New analyses of the largest impact crater on the moon reveal unexpected insights into its tumultuous past. They also suggest that once astronauts return to the moon, they will have access to a veritable gold mine of scientific clues that may help scientists solve some of the longstanding mysteries of how the moon came to be.

According to theory, massive red supergiant stars should cause most supernovae, yet they are rarely observed. New James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) observations indicate these supernovae likely can occur but are hidden in dust. Star’s dust was unusually carbon-rich, suggesting atypical chemical mixing during its death throes. Study marks first time JWST identified a supernova’s source star and first time supernova was imaged in mid-infrared wavelengths.

A new study co-led by the University of Oxford and Google Cloud has shown how general-purpose AI can accurately classify real changes in the night sky — such as an exploding star, a black hole tearing apart a passing star, a fast-moving asteroid, or a brief stellar flare from a compact star system — and explain its reasoning, without the need for complex training.

For millions of years, a fragment of ice and dust has drifted between the stars — a frozen message in a bottle from another world. This summer, that message reached our solar system as 3I/ATLAS, only the third known interstellar comet. Using NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, Auburn University scientists detected the comet’s faint ultraviolet signature of hydroxyl (OH) — a by-product of water vapor — revealing that this visitor from another star is actively releasing water into space. Swift’s unique vantage point above Earth’s atmosphere allowed the team to capture ultraviolet light invisible to ground-based telescopes, uncovering new clues about how icy bodies — and the ingredients for life — form in planetary systems beyond our own.