Athena Coustenis, Niklas Hedman and Gerhard Kminek for the COSPAR Panel on Planetary Protection discuss updates in the Planetary Protection Policy to ensure sustainable scientific lunar exploration.
F Barry Dunning and Thomas C Killian from the Department of Physics & Astronomy at Rice University depict the benefits of research into the remarkable physical and chemical properties of Rydberg atoms.
A Stanford University astrophysicist, Dan Wilkins, observed the first detection of light from behind a black hole - proving that Einstein's general theory of relativity works.
The European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (ESO's VLT) has captured new images of nearby galaxies, allowing scientists to locate the exact locations of young stars.
The £10,000 award, named after the noted Caroline Herschel, will be given to a UK or Germany-based female scientist who pushes the boundaries of astrophysics further.
Astrophysicists have argued for ten years about the speed of the universe expanding - now, a study by Wendy Freedman at the University of Chicago finds that the standard model could be close to the truth.
In a galaxy 900 million light-years away, there were two black hole-neutron star mergers - creating gravitational waves that hit Earth only in January, 2020.
![Figure 1 - The figure illustrates the diversity and multi-scale nature of the structures in the Galaxy. The first two lines are real astronomical images, which go from the galactic disk itself and down to the planet-forming disks. The last two lines are generated from numerical simulations and aim to understand and interpret the observations. [adapted from Facchini et al. 2025, Göller et al. 2025, Hennebelle et al. 2022, Lebreuilly et al. 2024, Molinari et al. 2016, 2025, Reissl et al. 2016]](https://www.openaccessgovernment.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/figure.png)
