The Chinese Chang’e-6 mission plans to bring a sample from the lunar farside in 2024. Here the characterization and scientific potential of the three candidate landing sites are presented. They are located around the roughly 4-Gyr-old Apollo crater, located within the South Pole–Aitken basin.

JWST observations of GRB 221009A reveal the associated supernova, confirming that the GRB resulted from the collapse of a rapidly rotating massive star. The lack of r-process emission suggests that these extreme events are not key sources of the heaviest elements.

A three-dimensional reconstruction of a bright flare orbiting the black hole Sagittarius A^* is computationally recovered from ALMA light curve data by constraining a neural network with a gravitational model of black holes.

Observation of new lava flows between different Magellan radar scans in regions of Sif Mons and Niobe Planitia confirms that volcanism on Venus is still ongoing. This evidence also suggests the planet’s volcanic activity exceeds previous estimates.

The near-infrared spectrometer onboard JWST has detected CO₂ and CO ices on 56 and 29 trans-Neptunian objects, respectively, indicating two dominant compositional types among them. These compositional differences suggest varied formation regions in the protoplanetary disk.

Utilizing a synergistic dataset from three Mars orbiters, it is shown that water photolysis above the main region of cloud formation in the Martian atmosphere is the dominant source of hydrogen available for atmospheric escape on Mars.

Simulations show that the competing effects of the solar wind and planetary rotation can explain the structure of planetary aurorae: the former dominates for Earth-type and the latter for Jupiter-type aurorae, with the highly variable aurorae at Saturn representing a transition state.

The SPECULOOS project detected an Earth-sized planet in a short orbit around a nearby Jupiter-sized star. This planet, SPECULOOS-3 b, is one of the most promising rocky exoplanets for detailed emission spectroscopy characterization with JWST.

Precise mass and radius measurements of giant planet WASP-193 b find an extremely low density of 0.059 ± 0.014 g cm⁻³. Current evolutionary models cannot fully explain such a low density, but the extended atmosphere makes WASP-193 b very suitable for high-precision characterization via JWST.

The Sanya incoherent scatter radar (SYISR) system has now been augmented to become the world’s first phased-array tristatic ISR system, enabling it to sense volumes of the Earth’s ionosphere, explain the SYISR-TS leadership team.

A survey of astronomy and geophysics professionals has revealed prevalent bullying and harassment within the sector, with women and marginalized groups most likely to suffer. It is time for the community to face up to the issue and discuss ways of tackling it.