13.8 billion years.
How did we get here?

JWST Finds a Stellar Bar in the Early Universe That Breaks All Rules — The James Webb Space Telescope has spotted a rotating bar of stars inside galaxy GN20 — a structure astronomers thought took billions of years to form — just 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang, upending models of early galaxy evolution.

Rubin Observatory Tracks Asteroids, Failed Supernovas, and Interstellar Visitors — The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is ushering in a new era of big-data astronomy, with early results already cataloguing skyscraper-size near-Earth objects, stars that collapse without a bang, and objects that don't belong to our solar system at all.

How We See the Beautiful, Violent Sun — From Galileo's sunspot sketches to NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory capturing X-class flares in ultraviolet, a stunning visual history of how humans have learned to read the nearest star — and why we're still surprised by it.

Blue Origin Rocket Explosion Rattles NASA's Moon Mission — Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket exploded on the launchpad in Florida on May 28, dealing a serious blow to NASA's Artemis lunar plans and raising fresh questions about the US strategy to return humans to the Moon before China.

ESA's SMILE Spacecraft Launches to Map Earth's Magnetic Shield — ESA's Solar wind Magnetosphere Ionosphere Link Explorer lifted off on May 19 to study how the Sun's charged particle stream interacts with Earth's magnetosphere — the invisible force field that makes our planet habitable.