On April 20, 2025, from just 1,700 miles away, the Lucy spacecraft snapped a jaw-dropping high-res photo of asteroid Donaldjohanson, a space rock that’s been spinning through the solar system for 150 million years. Captured by the Lucy Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (L’LORRI), the image shows a rugged, stretched-out asteroid, about 5 miles long and 2 miles wide, looking a bit like a cosmic potato with details as small as 130 feet across.
Photo credit: Sotheby’s
A 54-pound chunk of Mars, dubbed NWA 16788, is stealing the show at Sotheby’s Geek Week auction, running online through July 16, 2025. This massive Martian meteorite, the biggest of its kind ever found on Earth, tells a wild tale that stretches across millions of years and 140 million miles. Discovered in Northwest Africa in 2023, it’s a cosmic relic from a violent past that has bids already hitting $1.92 million (including the buyer’s premium) and a top estimate of $4 million.
Ryan Gosling’s latest space adventure, Project Hail Mary, combines hardcore science, raw emotion, and a pinch of cosmic humor. Helmed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, the masterminds behind The LEGO Movie and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, this take on Andy Weir’s 2021 hit novel rockets into theaters and IMAX on March 20, 2026.
The Andromeda Galaxy, our Milky Way’s closest spiral neighbor, sits 2.5 million light-years away. For over 25 years, NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory has been peeling back the universe’s high-energy secrets, and its latest work is a new portrait of Andromeda, or Messier 31 (M31).
Curiosity, NASA’s battle-scarred rover, has been exploring the Red Planet since 2012 like a cosmic detective, and now it’s stumbled into a strange area near Mount Sharp. The ground here is etched with boxwork patterns—delicate, crisscrossing ridges that look like nature’s take on a waffle iron.
Spiral galaxies often dazzle with their swirling arms, but UGC 11397, caught in Hubble’s latest snapshot, hides a supermassive secret. Nestled 250 million light-years away in the constellation Lyra, this galaxy hides a crazy secret at its heart—a supermassive black hole 174 million times heftier than our Sun.
Photo credit: Andrew McCarthy
Astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy snagged a “once-in-a-lifetime gem” on Sunday when the International Space Station (ISS) glided across the Sun, perfectly timed with a dramatic solar flare bursting from the star’s surface. “I start with one photo as my ‘base’ and layer in stacked versions of the Sun and ISS to cut noise and boost clarity,” he posted on X.
NASA’s Hubble and Webb definitely have some competition. European Southern Observatory (ESO) astronomers have just revealed the most detailed thousand-color image taken by the ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) of the Sculptor Galaxy (NGC 253), also known as Caldwell 65, a spiral galaxy located 11 million light-years from Earth.
ESA’s Proba-3 mission, consisting of two orbiting satellites, has officially created the world’s first artificial solar eclipse. ASPIICS Science Operations Centre (SOC), hosted by the Royal Observatory of Belgium, processed the images that you are about to see. How so? A dedicated team of scientists and engineers creates operational commands for the coronagraph based on requests from the scientific community.
Astronomy fans rejoice! The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope captured a stunning image of NGC 4449, a dwarf galaxy located just 12.5 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Canes Venatici (The Hunting Dogs). As part of the M94 galaxy group, this galaxy is a cauldron of star formation.