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    Perseverance takes the first picture of a visible Martian aurora

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    On some Martian nights, a subtle, green glow hangs low in the sky, wreathing the horizon in every direction.

    A visible Martian aurora has finally been observed for the first time, researchers report May 14 in Science Advances. The observation, made March 18, 2024, by the Perseverance rover, is also the first of an aurora from the surface of a planet that isn’t Earth. Moreover, it suggests future astronauts may witness ethereal Martian auroras with their own eyes. “It would be a dull or dim green glow to astronauts’ eyes,” says Roger Wiens, a planetary scientist at Purdue University in Lafayette, Ind.

    Auroras can appear when charged particles from space interact with a planet’s atmosphere. They’ve already been spotted on Mercury, Jupiter and every other non-Earth planet in our solar system, but only from orbit. And in Mars’ sky, scientists had only been able to detect auroral wavelengths of light invisible to the naked eye, using instruments. So it wasn’t clear how Martian auroras would appear to future, landed astronauts.

    On March 18, 2024, instruments aboard the Perseverance rover captured an image of a Martian aurora. Though relatively faint, the aurora’s green hues (left) can be made out by comparing the image with one of the typical inky Martian night (right). Due to the phenomenon’s subtle nature, the rover’s instruments were pointed at a low angle over the horizon to peer through a thick layer of the atmosphere. E.W. Knutsen et al/Science Advances 2025

    Compared to many Earthly aurora photos, the new image from Mars is fuzzy. There are a couple reasons for that. First, Perseverance’s cameras perform less well at night, Wiens says. “The instruments aren’t tremendously more sensitive than human eyes,” he says.

    And second, Mars doesn’t have a global magnetic field that concentrates auroras near its poles like Earth does. Instead, its crust is magnetized in patches. That means auroras can appear all over the planet, but they’re relatively dim. More

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      A gas cloud 5,500 times as massive as the sun lurks nearby

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      Astronomers have found a giant interstellar cloud surprisingly close to Earth.

      Lurking about 300 light-years from our solar system, this immense cloud of gas and dust is the closest of its kind ever found to Earth, beating the previous record holder by roughly 90 light-years. Despite being some 5,500 times as massive as the sun, the cloud went unnoticed — until now.

      That’s because the cloud does not contain much carbon monoxide, the molecule astronomers often use to probe these clouds, called molecular clouds. Astronomers found this cloud by scanning the sky for ultraviolet light coming from a molecular cloud’s main constituent, hydrogen molecules. The results, published April 28 in Nature Astronomy, reveal a crescent-shaped cloud that, if visible, would appear to viewers on Earth as the largest single structure in the night sky — roughly 40 full moons wide. More

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      See how the Hubble Space Telescope is still revolutionizing astronomy

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      After 35 years, the Hubble Space Telescope is still churning out hits. In just the last year or so, scientists have used the school bus–sized observatory to confirm the first lone black hole, reveal new space rocks created by a NASA asteroid-impact mission and pinpoint the origin of a particularly intense, mysterious burst of radio waves.

      These findings are a testament to the fact that there’s still plenty of science for the telescope to do. And there are some observations that simply can’t be done with any other telescope, including Hubble’s younger sibling, the James Webb Space Telescope. More

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      A gas clump in the Milky Way’s neighborhood might be a ‘dark galaxy’

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      A potential dark galaxy — one made primarily of dark matter — may have been spotted in the local universe.

      Dark galaxies are theoretical, starless systems whose discovery could help astronomers better understand galaxy formation. The new candidate was found within a large, fast-moving cloud of gas first seen in the 1960s. High-resolution observations of the cloud, reported April 18 in Science Advances, revealed a compact clump of gas that might be a dark galaxy. More

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      A claimed hint of alien life whips up spirited debate

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      You may have already seen the headlines: Signs of life have reportedly been discovered on an alien world. 

      A team of astronomers led by Nikku Madhusudhan of the University of Cambridge used the James Webb Space Telescope to search for interesting molecules in the atmosphere of a planet outside our solar system called K2 18b. The team now says they’ve found molecules that, on Earth, are associated with life, in an abundance that is hard to explain otherwise. More

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      A NASA rover finally found Mars’ missing carbon

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      The carbon that once warmed Mars’ atmosphere has been locked in its rusty rocks for millennia. 

      That’s the story revealed by a hidden cache of carbon-bearing minerals unearthed by NASA’s Curiosity rover along its route up a Martian mountain. The finding is the first evidence of a carbon cycle on the Red Planet, but also suggests that Mars lost its life-friendly climate because that carbon cycle was slow, researchers report in the April 18 Science. More

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      Yes, there really is a black hole on the loose in Sagittarius

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      For the first time, astronomers have confirmed the existence of a lone black hole — one with no star orbiting it.

      It’s “the only one so far,” says Kailash Sahu, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.

      In 2022, Sahu and his colleagues discovered the dark object coursing through the constellation Sagittarius. A second team disputed the claim, saying the body might instead be a neutron star. New observations from the Hubble Space Telescope now confirm that the object’s mass is so large that it must be a black hole, Sahu’s team reports in the April 20 Astrophysical Journal. More

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      Check out some of the weird rocks that have turned up on Mars

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      As the Mars rover Perseverance crested the top of Witch Hazel Hill, its operators back on Earth expected amazing things. This area on the western rim of the Jezero crater, along an ancient river delta that Perseverance has been exploring since it landed in 2021, is thought to contain some of the oldest rocks on the planet’s surface. The light-toned, layered materials promise a record of a wetter time, possibly one that hosted life.

      The team did not expect what they found on March 11: a dark rock resembling a clutch of frog’s eggs. Dubbed St. Paul’s Bay, the rock looks nothing like its neighbors. Where it came from and how it formed are a mystery. More

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      A nebula’s X-ray glow may come from a destroyed giant planet

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      The decades-long mystery of a never-ending explosion of X-rays around the remains of a dead star may have finally been solved. The radiation probably originates from the scorching-hot wreckage left behind by a giant planet’s annihilation.

      This discovery stems from four decades of X-ray observations of the Helix Nebula, located 650 light-years from Earth. The stream of X-ray radiation remained effectively constant over at least 20 years, researchers report in the January Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The best explanation, the scientists say, is that the ruins of a Jupiter-sized world continuously fall onto the nebula’s white dwarf star, getting frazzled and glowing in X-rays. More