Astronomers want to unlock the secrets of the 'Cosmic Dawn' by sending a miniature spacecraft to listen out for an "ancient whisper" on the far side of the Moon. The proposed mission will study the very early universe, right after the Big Bang, when it was still quite dark and empty before the first stars and galaxies appeared. But to probe the cosmic 'Dark Ages', silence is essential. And Earth is a very 'noisy' place for radio signals, with interference from our atmosphere and all our electronics. "It's like trying to hear that whisper while a loud concert is playing next door," said Dr Eloy de Lera Acedo, who is presenting the proposal today at the Royal Astronomical Society’s National Astronomy Meeting 2025 in Durham.

A new UK-led satellite mission concept aims to strengthen the country's position in space weather observation and forecasting by deploying a suite of homegrown scientific instruments on a low-cost spacecraft in low-Earth orbit. The proposal is being presented today (Wednesday) at the Royal Astronomical Society's National Astronomy Meeting 2025 in Durham. UK-ODESSI (UK-Orbital pathfinDEr for Space-borne, Space-weather Instrumentation) would act as a pathfinder for a new generation of UK-developed space weather instruments.

New research utilising data from NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has provided the first direct evidence of a phenomenon known as the “helicity barrier” in the solar wind. This discovery, published in Physical Review X by Queen Mary University of London researchers, offers a significant step towards understanding two long-standing mysteries: how the Sun’s atmosphere is heated to millions of degrees and how the supersonic solar wind is generated.

Radar systems used by civilian airports and military operations are inadvertently revealing our existence to potential advanced alien civilisations, new research shows. The study explored how hidden electromagnetic leakage might look to extraterrestrials up to 200 light-years from Earth, if they had state-of-the-art radio telescopes like our own. Theoretically, it also suggests this is how far we would be able to look to spot aliens who have evolved to use a similar level of technology. Preliminary results revealed at the Royal Astronomical Society’s National Astronomy Meeting 2025 in Durham show how worldwide aviation hubs such as Heathrow, Gatwick and New York’s JFK International Airport give off clues to our existence.

Earth and our entire Milky Way galaxy may sit inside a mysterious giant hole which makes the cosmos expand faster here than in neighbouring regions of the universe, astronomers say. Their theory is a potential solution to the 'Hubble tension' and could help confirm the true age of our universe, which is estimated to be around 13.8 billion years old. The latest research – shared at the Royal Astronomical Society’s National Astronomy Meeting (NAM) in Durham – shows that sound waves from the early universe, "essentially the sound of the Big Bang", support this idea.

University of Maryland astronomers discovered that an unexpected blast of space rocks ejected during DART mission carried three times more momentum than the spacecraft itself, leading to new insights for future planetary defense missions.