A newly formed crater on the moon is teaching us about our nearest neighbour’s complex geology. The crater, formed by an asteroid impact in 2024, is the largest that we’ve ever watched form in real time.

It was first spotted last year, when researchers compared sets of images taken by in both 2024 and 2025, and was named McGetchin crater. According to models of how often impacts occur on the moon, one this big – about 222 metres across – is only expected to occur about once every 132 years.

While the moon has many larger craters, watching one as it forms and evolves presents a unique opportunity to learn about the lunar surface and its geology. “Cratering is probably the most common process that happens in the solar system, so we spend a lot of time trying to understand how a new crater will modify a surface and watching that degrade over time,” says at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland. “Having a baseline for a pristine crater that can serve as our calibration point for how these processes start is really incredible.”

Powell and his colleagues measured the surface temperature in the region around McGetchin crater, and found that the impact had formed a spot about 7 kilometres wide that is a handful of degrees colder than the rest of the area during the lunar night. These cold spots form when the lunar dust fluffs up after an impact, so it cools down faster after the sun sets.

Another team, led by at Intuitive Machines in Texas, found that the impact flung dust and rocks more than 120 kilometres from the crater itself. “Over the last several years, we’ve developed this understanding that these impacts modify more than just the region right where the crater is,” says Powell. “It’s really striking that a crater can modify the lunar surface to distances far larger than the crater itself.”

This will helps us understand and study the history of the moon and other airless, cratered objects in the solar system, but it could also aid in future exploration. “If we’re trying to send rovers or astronauts or build things on the moon, we want to understand the properties of the surface,” says Powell. And watching a huge new crater form and change over time is one of the best remote probes of the surface we’ve ever had.

Saturn has a new, odd weather pattern resembling a decagon near its south pole. This may have formed due to a large storm nearby, but researchers aren’t totally sure.

The pattern has clearly defined sides shaped by powerful winds, looking like a decagon – a geometric polygon with 10 sides and 10 angles – from above. It is similar to a hexagonal weather pattern first seen at the planet’s north pole more than 40 years ago.

“[But] the one at the north is a bit smaller,” says at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. The south pole pattern also seems to be moving a bit more with the rotation of the planet.

The feature was first spotted by amateur astronomers in 2024. Simon and her colleagues then examined images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope from 2023 to 2025. “We confirmed the existence of the decagon with absolute clarity,” says team member at the University of the Basque Country in Spain.

It is unclear exactly when the pattern formed, with no spacecraft having orbited Saturn since 2017. “It most certainly wasn’t expected,” says Simon. “The hexagon has been there for decades, but this is something new.”

The decagon measures about 13,000 kilometres across, slightly wider than Earth. It is thought to result from a large atmospheric wave shaped by wind from a powerful jet stream that meanders near the planet’s south pole.

Its formation may be linked to a large nearby storm, although the exact cause is a bit of a mystery. “It’s a very complicated fluid dynamics sort of thing,” says Simon. “It’s telling us something about what’s going on deeper below the clouds.”

Saturn’s rings form a giant dusty doughnut encircling the planet

The rings of Saturn are normally thought to be flat, but measurements by the Cassini spacecraft show that some of their particles fly hundreds of thousands of kilometres above and below the thin main discs

at the California Institute of Technology says the discovery highlights that Saturn is a dynamic, changing world. “It’s very interesting to see these features,” he says.

No similar pattern has been observed on any other planets, although Jupiter does have an at its poles. “People didn’t really predict that such an organised, polygonal pattern would exist on another planet,” says Ingersoll.

We don’t know how long the pattern will last. Other telescopes, including the James Webb Space Telescope, are poised to study it in more detail, but many scientists are vying for access to those. “We’ll look as frequently as anyone will let us,” says Simon.

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Venus has no moon, but a modelling study suggests it probably did have one for nearly 2 billion years – before the planet ate it. Understanding this could help us learn about Venus’s previous habitability.

Many large objects probably hit Venus in the early solar system, which could have formed a moon, similar to the giant impact that is thought to have formed Earth’s moon. “There’s a very good chance that Venus did have a moon-forming impact,” says at the University of California, Riverside.

The lack of a moon today is therefore quite unusual, but Kane and his colleagues might have an answer. They modelled what would have happened if Venus did have a moon, and found that in almost all scenarios, it would have been consumed by the planet, long erased from existence by the present day.

Venus rotates quite strangely with respect to the sun, completing a rotation once every 243 days, compared with its orbit of 225 days. This is possibly a result of its thick atmosphere slowing its spin.

In contrast, Earth’s much faster spin transfers angular momentum to our moon, meaning it is moving away a few centimetres each year. For Venus, the opposite would have been true. “The moon is transferring angular momentum inward instead of outward,” says Kane. “It causes the moon’s orbit to catastrophically collapse.”

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The researchers found that at the upper limit of their models, a moon about half the mass of our own could have survived around Venus for 1.7 billion years. At twice the mass of our moon, it would have survived just 30 million years, because of the stronger tidal effect.

Once the moon reached a distance of about 15,000 kilometres, it would have encountered a boundary known as the Roche limit. “That’s where Venus’s gravity rips the moon apart and consumption occurs,” says Kane, with the moon’s debris temporarily forming a ring around Venus until it fell into the atmosphere.

at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, says the model is interesting but hard to prove. “It’s exceedingly hard to test this idea because there is basically nothing left behind.” This is because Venus’s surface has been repeatedly resurfaced by volcanism, he says.

What changes will occur on Earth as the moon moves further away?

From tides to eclipses, the slow departure of our moon will affect life on Earth, say our correspondents

Kane, however, says a future mission to the surface of Venus could include a seismometer, a device that measures seismic waves to study the interior of the planet. This could look for evidence of a consumed moon buried underground. “That would tell us a lot,” he says.

If Venus did have a moon, it may have played a role in the planet’s habitability, with Venus once thought to have had oceans on its surface. It is possible a moon could be linked to the planet’s runaway greenhouse effect, in which it lost all its water for reasons unknown and developed a thick, deadly atmosphere.

“If there was an early habitable period of Venus, then the big question is what brought that to an end,” says Kane. A moon crashing into the planet could have evaporated much of its water. “It could definitely be connected to Venus’s runaway greenhouse state,” says Kane.

On 12 August, a total solar eclipse will sweep across parts of Europe and the Atlantic ocean as the moon passes between Earth and the sun, blocking out sunlight. Parts of the US and Africa, along with the entire UK and much of Europe and Canada, will see a partial solar eclipse.

Where can I see the eclipse in the UK and US?

While the total eclipse will be short and only visible in a few areas, a partial eclipse, with the moon taking a “bite” out of the sun, will last much longer across about a quarter of the entire planet. It won’t be as dramatic as a total eclipse – the corona will not become visible, and the ambient light levels and temperatures won’t drop as dramatically – but will be watchable for many more people.

In the UK and Ireland, 90 to 96 per cent of the sun will be covered by the moon. In London, the eclipse will last from 6.17 to 8.06pm, with the maximum at 7.12. The sun will be setting, so you need to be somewhere with a clear view to the west.

In most of Canada, Alaska and the northeastern US, the moon will cover less than half of the sun. Montreal will get an 18 per cent eclipse at 1.45pm and New York will get a 9 per cent eclipse at 1.54pm.

Where can I see the total eclipse?

Totality, which occurs when the moon lines up perfectly with the disc of the sun and blocks it out entirely, will begin in Russia around midday before sweeping eastward across the Arctic ocean. It will pass just south of the North Pole and make landfall in northeastern Greenland just after 4.00pm local time.

The shadow will then rush along the eastern coast of Greenland at a speed of more than 3400 kilometres per hour. The maximum length of totality will be about 2 minutes and 18 seconds, as the moon’s shadow crosses from Greenland into the Atlantic ocean. It will cross to Iceland, at which point the eclipse will become visible from more heavily inhabited areas – everywhere it will have passed so far is home only to small villages, research stations and those specifically making the journey to see the eclipse. In Reykjavík, though, totality will be visible for just over one minute at 5.48pm local time. This is the first time a total eclipse has been visible in Iceland since 1954, and the last time one will be visible there until 2196.

After skimming the western coast of Iceland, the total eclipse will make another ocean crossing and reach land again in northern Spain just before 8.30pm local time, grazing the northeast corner of Portugal and crossing the Balearic Islands off Spain’s east coast before the sun sets and the eclipse is over.

How can I watch the eclipse safely?

During a total or partial eclipse, eye protection is needed the whole time. If you don’t have eclipse glasses, you can use a pinhole camera or even natural shadows to create a projection of the sun’s shape as the moon passes in front of it. Read this article for more details of how to do that.

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What happens during a total solar eclipse?

During totality, when the disc of the sun is completely concealed by the moon, temperatures on the ground rapidly drop by several degrees and daytime transforms into twilight. The stars and the outer reaches of the sun become visible. Usually, the sun’s outermost layer, the corona, is completely lost in the glare from its far brighter inner regions, but when those are blocked out, its shimmering sheets of extraordinarily hot plasma become briefly visible to the naked eye. In all other phases of the eclipse, it is crucial to wear eclipse glasses or use a solar filter while looking directly at the sun to prevent eye damage, but during totality it is safe to look at the corona.

That is precisely what many solar scientists will be doing during August’s eclipse. Total eclipses mark a valuable opportunity to observe the corona and try to unravel its many mysteries, including why it is so much hotter than the sun’s surface.

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The first images of the impact crater caused by an out-of-control SpaceX craft have emerged. Part of a SpaceX rocket crashed into the moon at about 8700 kilometres per hour on 5 August.

The images were taken by the Danuri lunar orbiter, operated by the Korea AeroSpace Administration (KASA). They show both before and after the impact and reveal that the crash did indeed leave a crater.

The craft in question was the upper stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that launched in January last year, carrying the Hakuto-R spacecraft from commercial company ispace – which, ironically, also crashed into the moon during an unsuccessful landing attempt.

Astronomers around the world had trained their telescopes on the spot in the hope of observing the impact, but its tiny size made it virtually impossible for amateur observers to make out.

KASA revealed the images and warned that videos being shared on social media purporting to show footage of the impact are fake.

It is thought that the almost 14-metre-long, 4000-kilogram Falcon upper stage impacted the moon at 5.35am BST on 5 August, near to Einstein crater – named for physicist Albert Einstein – which is towards the edge of the visible moon from Earth.

NASA had predicted prior to impact that the crash would create a crater 18 metres wide and 4 metres deep. Further images from a NASA lunar orbiter will provide more detail of the site in the coming days and weeks.

at the Open University, UK, says the images make it hard to be certain about the nature of the crater, but that higher-quality ones should emerge in time.

“The moon’s got about 100 million natural craters in that size range, so in the scheme of things, this is nothing,” he says. “You’ll get several a decade of this kind of size forming naturally.”

Unlike the Apollo lander sites, which have been photographed in great detail, the SpaceX impact site may not show any visible evidence of the craft because of its high impact speed, says Rothery. But the ejected regolith will probably be lighter in colour than the surrounding surface, at least until it is weathered by sunlight over tens of millions of years.

Some had suggested in the wake of the impact that the new crater be named after SpaceX owner Elon Musk, but the suggestion has been shot down by astronomers.

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, chair of the International Astronomical Union Working Group on Planetary System Nomenclature, which oversees the naming of celestial objects and features, says it wouldn’t be in line with rules on such matters.

“Formal feature naming is restricted to natural geological formations that serve a long-term cartographic and scientific reference purpose for the global community,” she says. “Spacecraft impact sites are frequently given informal or working nicknames by mission teams. The [SpaceX] mission team can give it any nickname they like, but it will not become an official name.”

Furthermore, if a crater is named to commemorate a person, this person has to have been deceased for at least three years, says Schulz, while Musk is still alive.

During a solar eclipse, the shadow of the moon moves across the surface of Earth as the moon travels between our planet and the sun. Thanks to a cosmic coincidence – the fact that the sun is both about 400 times larger than the moon and about 400 times as distant – when the two line up just right, they appear the same size and the moon completely covers the disc of the sun in a total eclipse. 

Totality, the period in which the disc of the sun is completely hidden, is the only time when it is safe to look directly at the sun; otherwise, looking at the sun can burn your retinas and cause vision loss. But during a partial eclipse, or even when no eclipse is happening at all, you can still look at the sun – you just need proper eye protection or a clever trick to project its image so you don’t have to look directly at it. Here are four ways to look at the sun without burning your eyeballs.

1. Wear eclipse glasses

This is the safest way to view a solar eclipse, and the only one that actually involves staring straight at the sun. Regular sunglasses won’t do the trick: eclipse glasses are about 100,000 times darker, letting through only a tiny fraction of sunlight to protect your eyes.

Looking through a pair of eclipse glasses, or any other kind of proper solar filter, you shouldn’t be able to see anything but the sun – even the brightest indoor light should appear extremely dim. The American Astronomical Society has put together a list of trusted suppliers, which you can see .

If you aren’t sure about the safety of your eclipse glasses or if they don’t seem quite dark enough, stick with one of the other methods on this list. If you are looking through a telescope or binoculars, eclipse glasses won’t be enough to protect your eyes – make sure any magnifying device has a proper solar filter over its objective lens or lenses, which are the ones through which light enters the device.

2. Use the shadows

The easiest way to view a partial eclipse doesn’t require any special equipment at all. When light passes through a small opening, it projects the shape of whatever emitted it onto the next surface that it hits.

During a partial eclipse, this means you can use shadows to see how much of the sun is hidden behind the moon. Anything can create the small openings necessary for this: a colander, cheese grater, straw hat or even your outstretched hands with fingers creating a sort of grid shape.

Even just standing under a tree and looking at the shadows cast by the leaves can reveal a smattering of crescent sun shapes on the ground.

3. Pinhole projection

If you want to get a little bit more involved, you can use the same effect to create a pinhole projector, which is essentially just a surface with a tiny hole poked in it.

If you take a cardboard box and poke a small hole in one end with a pushpin or pen, the shape of the sun will be projected on the other end. All you have to do is face away from the sun with the hole pointing towards the sun and look down to the other end of the box (if you have a big enough box, you can even put your head inside – if not, you might have to cut a slot to look through in the same side as the hole) and the shape of the sun will be projected there.

Don’t look through the tiny hole, because your head will block the light that should be shining through it. Looking through the hole directly at the sun will still burn your eyes, so you should only look at the projection on the other end of the box.

4. Mirror projection

This projection method is similar to the others – the theme being, don’t look right at the sun – but may be easier if you want a large projection of the sun that lots of people can look at.

All you need is a small, flat mirror and some way of angling it so that it reflects the sunlight onto a flat surface such as a wall or screen. If you cover the mirror almost entirely using a sheet of paper or cloth with a small hole cut in the middle, it will work just like the pinhole projector to shine an image of the sun on the wall.

The smaller the hole is, the sharper the image will be, although it will get dimmer as less light shines through. But if you can get your image big or sharp enough, you might even be able to see any sunspots that happen to be pocking the sun’s face during the eclipse.

Once again, don’t look at the sun via its reflection in the mirror, which is just as dangerous as looking directly at it if you don’t have eclipse glasses on. Only look at the projection of the sun, and you will be able to enjoy the eclipse without any unnecessary visits to an ophthalmologist.

Total solar eclipse tours and cruises

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The clearest images ever taken of the sun’s surface reveal striking wave patterns, reminiscent of those sometimes seen in clouds on Earth. Analysis of the patterns may improve our predictions of solar weather.

On 14 April 2025, with just a few minutes of their allotted time remaining at the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope in Hawaii and with clouds fast closing in that would force the closure of the observatory’s lens cover, a team of astronomers collected a series of extraordinary images – the most detailed ever recorded of the sun’s surface, known as the photosphere.

Most remarkably, the images revealed, for the first time, wave-shaped vortices known as Kelvin–Helmholtz instabilities (KHI) that had long been predicted to exist on the sun but had never before been observed.

“These swirling, vortex-like patterns are universal, appearing in cloud formations, ocean currents and across the cosmos,” says team member  at the National Solar Observatory in Colorado.

“A famous example is [Vincent] van Gogh’s The Starry Night, where the sky’s vortex structures closely resemble turbulent KHI structures,” he says. “A similar parallel appears in Hokusai’s famous woodblock print, The Great Wave off Kanagawa, where the curling crests of the wave echo the iconic shape of KHI billows.”

Another member of the team, , also at the National Solar Observatory, says that while the existence of some KHI in the solar photosphere was expected, it was a surprise to see the patterns “everywhere” in the images they processed.

The scale of what they were seeing was extraordinary – the telescope is 150 million kilometres from the sun, but it could pick out objects just a few tens of kilometres in length on its surface.

“Detecting and following the development of the 25 kilometre-size KHI vortices on the sun and identifying them as such is similar to identifying and tracking the motion of an average-sized ant on the ground from 160 km away,” says Wöger.

The KHI wave structures are formed on the boundaries of what the researchers describe as “granules”, structures between 500 and 2000 km in diameter, which are cells of rising plasma emerging from deep within the sun. The granules observed in the study were either close to a sunspot – a dark patch where magnetism blocks the escape of heat – or to one of numerous smaller sunspots called pores.

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The researchers think the KHI waves play a critical role in the dissipation and movement of heat. They may also influence the magnetic fields that drive coronal flares and other solar weather that can affect life on Earth and disrupt electromagnetic devices.

Wöger says the sun’s magnetic field is potentially impacted by KHI everywhere across its surface.

“To better understand and eventually forecast the sun’s most disruptive behaviours, we first have to understand the tiny physical processes that drive it,” he says. “This discovery reveals one of those processes for the first time at a level of detail we have not seen before.”

SpaceX rocket crashes into moon at 8700 kilometres per hour

A rocket launched last year is thought to have smashed into the lunar surface this morning, creating the moon's newest crater

 at the University of Sydney says that not only were the astronomers observing the sun at a finer scale than ever seen before, but they captured “something that looks incredible”.

“You zoom in, and you zoom in, and you zoom in, and then you see fundamental physics at the scale of 19 km – that’s just amazing,” says Wheatland.

He agrees that the discovery may help with understanding solar weather. 

“One of the outstanding problems in solar astrophysics is coronal heating,” he says. “It’s possible that Kelvin–Helmholtz instability is contributing to that.”

Part of a discarded SpaceX rocket is believed to have crashed into the moon at 8700 kilometres per hour earlier this morning. Astronomers around the world trained their telescopes on the predicted site of the impact in the hope of capturing images and eking some useful science out of the accidental collision.

The craft is the upper stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that launched in January last year carrying the Hakuto-R spacecraft from commercial company ispace – which, ironically, also crashed into the moon during an unsuccessful landing attempt.

It is thought that the almost 14-metre-long, 4000-kilogram Falcon upper stage impacted the moon at 5.35am BST today. The crash was predicted to occur close to Einstein crater, which would place it towards the edge of the visible moon from Earth.

at the University of Leicester, UK, says that telescopes around the world were trained on the site of the impact and that images of the area before and after impact will emerge soon. Lunar orbiters from South Korea and the US will also observe the impact site.

NASA predicts that the impact will have created a crater that is 18 metres wide and 4 metres deep.

“It is not a good thing to be randomly sending debris into the moon,” says Sargeant. “It’s not something we should be making a habit of. What if it hit a site of special interest? What if it caused damage to the historical Apollo landers?”

Both NASA and the European Space Agency are required to take the end of a spacecraft’s life into account before a mission launches, ensuring that there is a plan and enough fuel to safely deorbit it. Commercial companies aren’t covered by the same rules, says Sargeant, although efforts to introduce such requirements are under way.

When SpaceX launched the Falcon in question, the heavy payload required more thrust than usual, meaning that the rocket ended up floating uncontrollably in space. It eventually fell into an orbit that unintentionally put it on a collision course with the moon.

But Sargeant says that some science can be salvaged from the event, with astronomers likely to capture rare images of a moon crater being created and the lunar regolith plumes ejected from the impact.

at the Macau University of Science and Technology, China, says that all planetary surfaces should ideally be kept as pristine as is feasible – without hindering exploration – but that the moon has already been impacted by decades of US, Soviet and Russian, Chinese, Indian, Israeli and other nations’ missions, as well as millions of years of asteroid impacts.

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“Rockets have been landing, crashing and taking off from the surface for decades now,” says Bugiolacchi. A controlled crash may even be welcomed by planetary scientists, he says. “Knowing the projectile’s mass, impact velocity, angle and trajectory provide invaluable data on surface evolution. The primary agent shaping most planetary surfaces is high-velocity impacts. Normally, these events are entirely random in terms of physical properties and dynamics.”

“The moon already has about 100 million natural impact craters of the size expected to be made by this crash, so such a crash will hardly make a difference,” says at the Open University, UK. “I’d be happy with a deliberate collision into the moon if it were done with a science aim and was set up so as to be studied to learn about the moon’s interior or surface composition. However, this crash is accidental and reckless.”

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