A new software package detailed by Chinese scientists promises to tell what time it is on the moon, accounting for effects of relativity.
Did you ever wonder what time it is on the moon? A software package developed by researchers in China can finally tell you.

The model, built by a team from the Purple Mountain Observatory in Nanjing and the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei, was detailed in a paper published in December 2025 in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. The new lunar timekeeping method promises to remain accurate over a 1,000-year time span.

But why create a distinct lunar clock in the first place? For the answer, we turn — as we so often do — to Albert Einstein.

Because the moon has less gravity than Earth does, time passes slightly differently there. This effect was first predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity. For every 24 hours that pass here on terra firma, the moon gains about 56 microseconds, according to NASA.

While small, this discrepancy adds up over prolonged periods — a fact that could pose major issues for future crewed moon missions, like NASA's Artemis initiative or Russia and China's joint International Lunar Research Station. (Mars is an even bigger challenge, with clocks there ticking about 477 microseconds faster per Earth day.)

The first material ever collected from the far side of the Moon could help settle a long-held lunar mystery.

According to a Chinese Academy of Sciences analysis of Moon dust ferried to Earth by China's Chang'e-6 mission, the reason the natural satellite's two hemispheres are so different may be due to a giant impact long ago that literally altered the Moon's composition from the inside out.

It's a conclusion that neatly connects several features of the lunar far side, and shows that meteorite impacts aren't just cosmetic scars on a planet's surface - they can dramatically and permanently reshape the interiors of worlds.

Recently discovered Comet C/2025 R3 (PanSTARRS) will make its closest approach to the sun and Earth in late April and could potentially be visible to the naked eye. It may end up being the brightest comet of the year.
We may be less than two weeks into 2026, but a new comet is already leading the charge to become the "Great Comet" of the year. The highly anticipated ice ball, which could potentially be seen with the naked eye, will reach its closest point to us less than four months from now.

Scientists discovered the incoming comet, dubbed C/2025 R3 (PanSTARRS), on Sept. 8, 2025, in images captured by the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS) — a pair of 5.9-foot (1.8 meters) reflector telescopes located on the summit of Hawaii's Haleakalā volcano. It is currently around 216 million miles (348 million kilometers) from Earth, around halfway between the orbits of Jupiter and Mars, according to TheSkyLive.com.

C/2025 R3 is a long-period comet, meaning it likely takes more than 1,000 years to orbit the sun, and probably originates from the Oort cloud — a giant reservoir of comets and other icy objects near the edge of the solar system. Astronomers have yet to narrow down the comet's orbital pathway, so they do not know how long the ice ball takes to circle our home star. But similar discoveries in recent years have revealed comets that have not passed by Earth for tens of thousands of years.

C/2025 R3 is currently speeding toward the sun and will reach perihelion — its closest point to our home star — on April 20. It will come within 47.4 million miles (76.3 million km) of the sun, which is somewhere between the orbits of Mercury and Venus.

Just one week later, on April 27, the comet will make its closest approach to Earth, coming within 44 million miles (70.8 million km) of our planet, which is more than 180 times farther from us than the moon is.

Astronomers don't yet know how brightly the comet will shine during its solar flyby, Live Science's sister site Space.com recently reported. Some researchers have predicted that it will reach an apparent magnitude of 8, meaning it would be visible only via a decent telescope or pair of stargazing binoculars. But others estimate that it could reach magnitude 2.5, which would make it clearly visible to the naked eye. (Apparent magnitude is measured on a reverse logarithmic scale, meaning a lower number equates to a greater brightness.)

Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have just spotted a new type of celestial object: Cloud-9, a starless, gas-rich cloud of dark matter that was slightly too light to become a full-fledged galaxy.

As detailed in a study published Nov. 10 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters and presented this week at the 247th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Phoenix, this odd object is located more than 14 million light-years from Earth, near the spiral galaxy Messier 94 (M94). Cloud-9 is a cosmic relic, a primordial building block of galaxies that confirms the critical mass threshold needed for a body of gas and dark matter to collapse into a galaxy.

As a result, the discovery of Cloud-9 strongly supports a cornerstone of the leading cosmological framework that aims to explain the structure and composition of the universe — the Lambda cold dark matter model (LCDM). One of the model's major predictions is that dark matter settles in halos, which may or may not grow heavy enough to anchor galaxies.

First peer-reviewed paper using LSST Camera data identifies an asteroid, nearly the size of eight football fields, rotating every two minutes

Astronomers analyzing data from NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory, jointly funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science, have discovered the fastest-ever spinning asteroid with a diameter over half a kilometer — a feat uniquely enabled by Rubin. The study provides crucial information about asteroid composition and evolution, and demonstrates how Rubin is pushing the boundaries of what we can discover within our own Solar System.

As part of the NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory First Look event in June 2025, Rubin announced that it had observed thousands of asteroids cruising about our Solar System, about 1900 of which have been confirmed as never-before-seen [1]. Within the flurry, a team of astronomers has discovered 19 super- and ultra-fast-rotating asteroids. One of these is the fastest-spinning asteroid larger than 500 meters (0.3 miles) ever found.

Is the inside of a vision model at all like a language model? Researchers argue that as the models grow more powerful, they may be converging toward a singular "Platonic" way to represent the world.

Read a story about dogs, and you may remember it the next time you see one bounding through a park. That's only possible because you have a unified concept of "dog" that isn't tied to words or images alone. Bulldog or border collie, barking or getting its belly rubbed, a dog can be many things while still remaining a dog.

Artificial intelligence systems aren't always so lucky. These systems learn by ingesting vast troves of data in a process called training. Often, that data is all of the same type — text for language models, images for computer vision systems, and more exotic kinds of data for systems designed to predict the odor of molecules or the structure of proteins. So to what extent do language models and vision models have a shared understanding of dogs?

Hunter-gatherers cremated the headless body of a woman in a pyre around 9,500 years ago in what is now Malawi.
The 9,500-year-old remains of a woman in Malawi have set a new record, marking Africa's oldest evidence of intentional cremation, as well as the earliest known cremation pyre for an adult that is still "in situ," or in its original position, a new study finds.

The pyre is located at a hunter-gatherer burial ground at the foot of Mount Hora in Malawi, where the burials date to between 8,000 and 16,000 years ago. The pyre is the only known cremation at the site. The analysis of 170 bone fragments from the cremated individual indicated that she stood less than 5 feet (150 centimeters) tall and died between the ages of 18 and 60. The team also found stone tools, which may have been funerary objects, within the remains of the pyre.

"Surprisingly, there were no fragments of teeth or skull bones in the pyre," study co-author Elizabeth Sawchuk, a bioarchaeologist and curator of human evolution at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, said in a statement. "We believe the head may have been removed prior to burning."

Cuts on some of the bones indicate that parts of the deceased's body were stripped or separated, according to the study, which was published Jan. 1 in the journal Science Advances. These cuts, as well as the removal of the skull, could have been associated with remembrance, social memory and respect of ancestors, study lead author Jessica Cerezo-Román, an anthropologist at the University of Oklahoma, said in the statement.

The team also concluded that the woman was likely cremated just a few days after she died, before her body started decomposing.

The Chinese will be ahead of everyone else by at least one year, but probably several years.
China's next robotic moon mission is scheduled to launch later this year, helping set the stage for the nation's planned multi-phased lunar outpost.

The Chang'e 7 mission is on tap to reconnoiter the moon's south pole, making use of an orbiter, lander, rover and a water-seeking, well-instrumented lunar hopper.

This upcoming moon trek will also help advance the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS), a collaboration involving China, Russia and a number of other countries to set up a base near the lunar south pole.

Rigorous schedule

"Programmatically, the Chang'e series is on a rigorous schedule. They all launched as scheduled," said Norbert Schörghofer, a senior scientist for the Planetary Science Institute who's based in Honolulu, Hawaii.

"It's hard to know for sure what China is planning in the longer term, but since they have a successful lunar exploration program and lots of government resources, I'd fully expect they will construct a lunar base soon, perhaps using their own advanced robots," Schörghofer told Space.com.

A team using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered a new type of astronomical object - a starless, gas-rich, dark-matter cloud that is considered a 'relic' or remnant of early galaxy formation. Nicknamed 'Cloud-9,' this is the first confirmed detection of such an object in the Universe.

"This is a tale of a failed galaxy," said the programme's principal investigator, Alejandro Benitez-Llambay of the Milano-Bicocca University in Milan, Italy. "In science, we usually learn more from the failures than from the successes. In this case, seeing no stars is what proves the theory right. It tells us that we have found in the local Universe a primordial building block of a galaxy that hasn't formed."

"Our discovery offers further evidence that the galaxy may be teeming with rogue planets."

Rogue planets — worlds that drift through space alone without a star — largely remain a mystery to scientists. Now, astronomers have for the first time confirmed the existence of one of these starless worlds by pinpointing its distance and mass — a rogue planet roughly the size of Saturn nearly 10,000 light-years from Earth.

Planets are typically found bound to one or more stars. However, in 2000, astronomers detected the first signs of a "rogue planet" — a free-floating world that orbited no star. Then, in 2024, researchers detected an object distorting the light from a distant star, simultaneously from both Earth and space using several ground-based observatories as well as the European Space Agency's now-retired Gaia space telescope. These observations helped scientists estimate that the object was a newfound world found about 9,950 light-years from Earth in the direction of the Milky Way's center, with a mass about 70 times larger than Earth. (Saturn, on the other hand, is about 95 Earth masses.)