Much of what we know about them was gathered by Nasa’s Voyager 2 spacecraft which visited nearly 40 years ago.

But a new analysis shows that Voyager's visit coincided with a powerful solar storm, which led to a misleading idea of what the Uranian system is really like.

But the new analysis has solved the decades-long mystery. It shows that Voyager 2 flew past on a bad day.

The new research shows that just as Voyager 2 flew past Uranus, the Sun was raging, creating a powerful solar wind that might have blown the material away and temporarily distorted the magnetic field.

So, for 40 years we have had an incorrect view of what Uranus and its five largest moons are normally like, according to Dr William Dunn of University College London.

“These results suggest that the Uranian system could be much more exciting than previously thought. There could be moons there that could have the conditions that are necessary for life, they might have oceans below the surface that could be teeming with fish!”.

What's the closest active galaxy to planet Earth? That would be Centaurus A, cataloged as NGC 5128, which is only 12 million light-years distant. Forged in a collision of two otherwise normal galaxies, Centaurus A shows several distinctive features including a dark dust lane across its center, outer shells of stars and gas, and jets of particles shooting out from a supermassive black hole at its center. The featured image captures all of these in a composite series of visible light images totaling over 310 hours captured over the past 10 years with a homebuilt telescope operating in Auckland, New Zealand. The brightness of Cen A's center from low-energy radio waves to high-energy gamma rays underlies its designation as an active galaxy.

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The European Southern Observatory released this new image of the Milky Way’s black hole March 27, 2024. The newly released image shows the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy in polarized light. Polarized light enables astronomers to map a black hole’s magnetic field lines. The discovery also suggests our galaxy’s black hole may be harboring a hidden jet. Image via EHT Collaboration/ ESO.

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If you could stand on Mars -- what might you see? You might look out over a vast orange landscape covered with rocks under a dusty orange sky, with a blue-tinted Sun over the horizon, and odd-shaped water clouds hovering high overhead. This was just the view captured last March by NASA's rolling explorer, Perseverance. The orange coloring is caused by rusted iron in the Martian dirt, some of which is small enough to be swept up by winds into the atmosphere. The blue tint near the rising Sun is caused by blue light being preferentially scattered out from the Sun by the floating dust. The light-colored clouds on the right are likely composed of water-ice and appear high in the Martian atmosphere. The shapes of some of these clouds are unusual for Earth and remain a topic of research.

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[Image description: Hundreds of galaxies appear in this view, which is set against the black background of space. There are many overlapping objects at various distances. They include large, blue foreground stars, some with eight diffraction spikes, and white and pink spiral and elliptical galaxies. Numerous tiny orange dots appear throughout the scene.]

https://esawebb.org/images/weic2428a/

[Image description: Image of a galaxy on the black background of space. The galaxy is a very oblong, blue disk that extends from left to right at an angle (from about 10 o’clock to 5 o’clock). The galaxy has a small bright core at the centre. There is an inner disk that is clearer, with speckles of stars scattered throughout. The outer disk of the galaxy is whiteish-blue, and clumpy, like clouds in the sky. There are different coloured dots, distant galaxies, speckled among the black background of space surrounding the galaxy.]

https://esawebb.org/images/weic2427a/

Experience Earth, our solar system, nearby asteroids, the universe, and the spacecraft exploring them with immersive real-time 3D web-based apps. Start exploring your solar system now!

In this photograph astronaut and STS-113 mission specialist John B. Herrington, (center frame), participates in the mission's third spacewalk. The forward section of the Space Shuttle Endeavour is in right frame.

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https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap241104.html

Meghan Everett, NASA’s deputy chief scientist for the International Space Station program, said, “While some of you might think that wood in space seems a little counterintuitive, researchers hope this investigation demonstrates that a wooden satellite can be more sustainable and less polluting for the environment than conventional satellites.”

LignoSat was created by researchers at Kyoto University along with a homebuilding company, according to Reuters.

“With timber, a material we can produce by ourselves, we will be able to build houses, live and work in space forever,” Takao Doi, an astronaut who now studies human space activities at Kyoto University, told Reuters.

The Space Telescope Science Institute, which operates Webb on behalf of NASA and its international partners, said last week that it received 2,377 unique proposals from science teams seeking observing time on the observatory. The institute released a call for proposals earlier this year for the so-called "Cycle 4" series of observations with Webb.

This volume of proposals represents around 78,000 hours of observing time with Webb, nine times more than the telescope's available capacity for scientific observations in this cycle. The previous observing cycle had a similar "oversubscription rate" but had less overall observing time available to the science community.

More than 600 scientists will review the proposals and select the most promising ones for time on Webb. The largest share of proposals would involve observing "high-redshift" galaxies among the first generation of galaxies that formed after the Big Bang. Galaxies this old and distant have their light stretched to longer wavelengths due to the expansion of the Universe. Research involving exoplanet atmospheres and stars and stellar populations were the second- and third-most popular science categories in this cycle.

[Image description: Two spiral galaxies take up almost the entire view and appear to be overlapping. They are angled from top left to bottom right. The galaxy at left, IC 2163, is smaller and more compact than the galaxy at right, NGC 2207. The background of space is black, dotted with tiny foreground stars and extremely distant galaxies.]

https://esawebb.org/images/weic2426b/

What is the most spook-tacular nebula in the galaxy? One contender is LDN 43, which bears an astonishing resemblance to a vast cosmic bat flying amongst the stars on a dark Halloween night. Located about 1400 light years away in the constellation Ophiuchus, this molecular cloud is dense enough to block light not only from background stars, but from wisps of gas lit up by the nearby reflection nebula LBN 7. Far from being a harbinger of death, this 12-light year-long filament of gas and dust is actually a stellar nursery. Glowing with eerie light, the bat is lit up from inside by dense gaseous knots that have just formed young stars.

[Image description: A star cluster is shown inside a large nebula of many-coloured gas and dust. The material forms dark ridges and peaks of gas and dust surrounding the cluster, lit on the inner side, while layers of diffuse, translucent clouds blanket over them. Around and within the gas, a huge number of distant galaxies can be seen, some quite large, as well as a few stars nearer to us which are very large and bright.]

https://esawebb.org/images/weic2425a/

[Image description: the Aurora borealis painted the night sky with streaks of red, purple, and green all the way down to the 43rd parallel this evening]

[Image Description: A dense cluster of bright stars, each with six large and two small diffraction spikes, due to the telescope’s optics. They have a variety of sizes depending on their brightness and distance from us in the cluster, and different colours reflecting different types of star. Patches of billowing red gas can be seen in and around the cluster, lit up by the stars. Small stars in the cluster blend into a background of distant stars and galaxies on black.]

https://esawebb.org/images/potm2409b/