The Cassini mission’s samples from Saturn’s moon Enceladus have signs of various organic molecules that could be among the ingredients needed for life to get started

The success of the all-civilian spacewalk on SpaceX’s Polaris Dawn mission shows that private space flight is starting to catch up with government space agencies

The long-standing mystery of how supermassive black holes grew so huge so quickly could be solved by decaying dark matter

The second-closest planet to the sun is more geologically active than we thought and could have more than 17,000 venusquakes a year

Exoplanets in binary star systems usually orbit both stars, but astronomers have now spotted three planets orbiting one or the other star in a pair

See the world's best space images from the Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2024 award

Nearly imperceptible quantum flickers used to limit how precisely we could detect the way space-time ripples, but squeezing the laser light used in detectors overcomes this and doubles the number of gravitational waves we can see

Medically evacuating an astronaut from space is difficult and expensive, and a new model predicts that one in three long-duration moon missions may require it

A distant planet should have been consumed when its star expanded to become a red giant, perhaps offering insights into planetary migration

Astronomers listened for radio signals emanating from planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system, but found no evidence of any interplanetary communications

Astronomer Jo Dunkley is planning to use the Simons Observatory to snare evidence for inflation, the theory that the universe expanded at incredible speed after its birth

Astronomers have detected an exoplanet around Barnard’s star, one of the sun’s closest neighbours, but it is too hot for liquid water or life

Cracks running through samples of asteroid Ryugu were probably formed by the repeated thawing and freezing of water inside it, which could have helped asteroids like this carry the building blocks of life to early Earth

A computer simulation suggests that some collisions between exotic, hypothetical stars would make space-time ripple with detectable waves

The books, TV, games and more that New Scientist staff have enjoyed this week

Andrew McConnell's otherworldly photograph captures a Russian cosmonaut in front of the just-landed Soyuz MS spacecraft in Kazakhstan's remote grasslands

The European Space Agency is sending a probe to get a closer look at the asteroid Dimorphos, which had its orbit altered by NASA’s DART mission in 2022

Bacteria grown from carbon compounds in asteroids could be turned into a kind of nutritionally balanced milkshake

A detector on the International Space Station found signatures of unexpectedly abundant antimatter – which may have been created in clashes of dark matter particles

The European Space Agency's Hera spacecraft must be thoroughly tested before being sent to investigate the aftermath of the collision of NASA's DART probe with Dimorphos

The books, TV, games and more that New Scientist staff have enjoyed this week

SpaceX claims the fifth test flight of its Starship rocket will happen “within days”, but the Federal Aviation Administration has not yet approved the launch

My first sight of Saturn through a telescope inspired my love of space. Dig out your telescopes or visit your local astronomy club, and you may be lucky enough to spot our sixth planet's stunning thick band of rings, says Leah Crane

Meet NASA’s NEO Surveyor, the space telescope identifying hazardous asteroids and comets within 48 million kilometres of Earth’s orbit

The Euclid space telescope's massive “cosmic atlas” promises to shed light on fundamental questions in physics and cosmology

The first “failed star” ever discovered has been a weird outlier since it was found nearly 30 years ago. New observations show that it is unusually massive because it isn’t a single star after all

General relativity teaches us that observing a black hole is all a question of perspective – and technique, says Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

The books, TV, games and more that New Scientist staff have enjoyed this week

Moin Hussain's debut feature film Sky Peals sees a man discover his father may be from outer space. Part sci-fi, part family drama, part coming-of-age tale, it is odd and otherworldly

A nearby star that exploded some 3 million years ago could have removed all dust smaller than a millimetre from the outer solar system

Complex carbon-based molecules crucial to life on Earth originated somewhere in space, but we didn't know where. Now, huge amounts of them have been spotted in a huge, cold cloud of gas

The largest and most ambitious Martian drone yet could carry kilograms of scientific equipment over great distances and set itself down on the Red Planet unassisted

Asteroids that regularly fly between Earth, Venus and Mars could provide radiation shielding for human missions to explore neighbouring planets

A small world in the outer solar system appears to have volcanic activity possibly spurred by liquid water

Averting an asteroid strike will need many of the same skills we must hone to tackle climate change and future pandemics

Data collected by the Zhurong rover and orbiting satellites suggests the existence of an ancient shoreline in the Utopia Planitia region of Mars

In order to figure out how something came from nothing, we first need to explore the different types of nothing

From nuclear strikes to giant spikes, discover the systems in place to prevent a collision and test your decision-making to see if you could avoid a catastrophic impact

You might have heard about plans to establish a self‑sustaining city on Mars. Here’s what life would really be like on the Red Planet

Samantha Harvey has won the UK's top fiction prize for a novel that takes place over 24 hours on the International Space Station

A Spot robot equipped with a blowtorch can locate weeds on farms and precisely heat them up to stop them growing, offering a possible alternative to herbicides

Combining two neural networks has helped researchers predict potentially disastrous collapses in complex systems, such as financial crashes or power blackouts

Anil Ananthaswamy's Why Machines Learn: The elegant maths behind modern AI explores the mechanics of the AI revolution, but doesn't examine its ethics

AlphaProof, an AI from Google DeepMind, came close to matching the top participants in a prestigious competition for young mathematicians

The first ever full-scale demonstration of a nuclear reactor designed to passively cool itself in an emergency was a success, showing that it should be possible to build nuclear plants without the risk of dangerous meltdown

A robot can hold a squash, pumpkin or melon in one hand, while it is peeled by the other

Between 2005 and 2021, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube were more likely to make policy changes in the weeks after negative stories in the media

In Still Wakes the Deep, you play as a Glaswegian electrician on a 1970s oil rig. The well-crafted setting gives way to horror, but I wish I could linger in mundanity for longer, says Jacob Aron

Roads with variable speed limits, designed to manage traffic flow, are normally adjusted according to simple rules, but a 27-kilometre section of the I-24 freeway near Nashville, Tennessee, is now overseen by an artificial intelligence

Many people enjoy the experience of using AIs like ChatGPT or voice assistants like Alexa to find out information, but it turns out doing so makes it less likely you will spot inaccurate information