Volume 9 Issue 9, September 2025

Current funding challenges in astrophysics present an opportunity to secure its future through ambition, accountability and readiness for a world where breakthrough science is increasingly done in big teams.

Pluto’s atmosphere varies dramatically over a solar orbit but is challenging to monitor. Thermal emission by haze in Pluto’s atmosphere was detected with JWST and could be used to track the atmosphere’s evolution.

A conference at the International Academic Forum of Heidelberg University, Germany, brought together 80 experts across various disciplines to recount recent breakthroughs in extragalactic astrophysics and ask, where are you going, galaxy evolution?

Three independent theoretical approaches are used to assess the efficiency of the electromagnetic wave mode radiation at the plasma frequency from beam-generated sources during type III solar radio bursts, with parameters close to realistic conditions.

The MIRI spectrometer onboard JWST measured Pluto and Charon’s infrared emissions separately, uncovering surface properties and revealing that Pluto’s haze plays a key role in controlling the atmospheric temperature.

The discovery of 2023 KQ₁₄, a Sedna-like object with a perihelion of 66 au, fills a gap in the known population. Its orbit does not align with other Sedna-like objects, shedding light on the diversity and dynamical history of the outer Solar System.

Using Kepler, this study identifies a compact multiplanetary system that is not flat, where gravitational interactions cause its planets’ periods to change by nearly a day per cycle and their orbital planes to tilt back and forth.

JWST reveals the chemistry of the disk of a young star in the Orion nebula, showing that it has water and CO in its inner regions that are shielded from UV radiation, whereas UV-processed molecules such as CH₃⁺ and PAHs are detected in surface layers.

The analysis of radial velocity variations of O-type stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud reveals a large fraction of close binaries, suggesting that binary physics also plays a prominent role in the low-metallicity environment of the distant Universe.

Ultraviolet observations of an ultra-massive white dwarf with the Hubble Space Telescope reveal small amounts of carbon on the surface, identifying it as a merger remnant.

Observations of the young supernova remnant SNR 0509-67.5 in the Large Magellanic Cloud reveal concentric shells of ionized calcium and sulfur that resemble hydrodynamical simulations of the double detonation of a sub-Chandrasekhar-mass white dwarf.

High-resolution FAST observations of a very-high-velocity cloud in the warm neutral medium reveal a network of hierarchical filaments formed by shock compression. These findings suggest a viable mechanism for early structure formation in the interstellar medium.

Observations of a fast X-ray transient reveal that it is a gamma-ray-burst explosion from a very distant galaxy that emits light with the wavelength necessary to drive cosmic reionization, the last major phase change in the history of the Universe.

A new method for detecting axion-like particles through stacked spectra of active galactic nucleus–galaxy-cluster pairs probes previously inaccessible regions of their parameter space.

Supervised machine learning predicts 1.57 million quasar redshifts from Gaia Data Release 3 photometry and astrometry, providing a new observational test of the cosmological principle.

The Chinese Tianwen-2 mission will perform a double fly-by of two small bodies, sampling a near-Earth asteroid and returning samples to Earth before continuing towards a main-belt comet.