- Traces of comets and asteroids in distant solar systems: In young planetary systems, mutual collisions between asteroids or comets generate large amounts of dust, forming a "debris disk". The disk contains information about the system’s smaller bodies.

- Observational challenge accepted: Producing debris disk images is difficult, in particular because of the glare of the bright star in the center. The SPHERE instrument was optimised for that kind of observation.

- Familiar structures: Some of the disks imaged with SPHERE show structures reminiscent of the solar system, with asteroids concentrated in an asteroid belt inside the giant planet orbits, comets in a “Kuiper belt” outside.

An international team of researchers has used knowledge of historical geography to reexamine the earliest datable total solar eclipse record known to the scientific community, enabling accurate measurements of Earth's variable rotation speed from 709 BCE. The researchers calculated how the Sun would have appeared from Qufu, the ancient Chinese capital of the Lu Duchy, during the total solar eclipse. Using this information, they analyzed the ancient description of what has been considered the solar corona—the dim outer atmosphere of the Sun visible to the naked eye only during total eclipses—and found that its morphology supports recent solar cycle reconstructions for the 8th century BCE. 

On 2 December 1995 the ESA/NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) blasted into space – on what was supposed to be a two-year mission. 

Indian astronomers using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have discovered a stunning grand-design spiral galaxy that remarkably resembles our Milky Way, yet it existed when the Universe was just 1.5 billion years old, roughly a tenth of its present age. Named Alaknanda after a Himalayan river that shares its origins with the Mandakini (also the Hindi name for the Milky Way), the galaxy displays two symmetric spiral arms, a bright central bulge, and is forming stars at roughly 20 times the Milky Way's current rate. The discovery, made by Rashi Jain and Yogesh Wadadekar at the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (NCRA-TIFR) in Pune, India, challenges the long-held view that such well-ordered galaxies took billions of years to assemble. Early galaxies were expected to look chaotic and clumpy; Alaknanda proves some could mature far faster than theories predicted. A massive galaxy cluster acted as a natural magnifying glass, bending and amplifying the distant galaxy's light so JWST could capture it in striking detail. The finding, published in the leading European journal, Astronomy & Astrophysics, compels astronomers to rethink the cosmic timeline—suggesting the early Universe was a far more dynamic place than previously imagined, and that the seeds of worlds like ours may have been planted earlier than anyone thought.