News of the asteroid 2024 RW1 impacting near the Philippines may have come as a shock this week, but space agencies and astronomers around the world are keeping an eye out to protect us

Comet C/2023 A3, also known as Tsuchinshan–ATLAS, is expected to grace our skies from mid-October. Abigail Beall is hoping for a dazzling display

Greg Eghigian's After the Flying Saucers Came and Luis Elizondo's Imminent both show how our fascination with UFOs goes beyond simple curiosity

Space missions are extremely hard. Things going wrong should be expected, so having a sensible plan B is crucial

A newly spotted asteroid named 2024 RW1 burned up in the atmosphere over the South Pacific, creating a spectacular bright flash in the sky over the Philippines just hours after first being detected

A faint glow from all of the galaxies that have ever existed fills the cosmos, and NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has made the best measurement ever of just how faint it is

Ganymede, the largest moon in the solar system, has signs of an enormous ancient impact that would have redistributed its mass, changing its orientation in relation to Jupiter

NASA is investigating a strange noise coming through the speaker on Boeing’s Starliner capsule, which has been beset with technical issues

‘Little red dot’ galaxies seen by JWST appear to be much more tightly packed with stars than other galaxies, raising big questions about how they came to be this way

A chance to observe the high-speed re-entry of a falling satellite will give researchers important insights on how debris burns up in our atmosphere

Brown dwarfs could be hiding dark matter inside their cores – if they are, there would be signs that could help us track it down

The Polaris Dawn mission will include the first ever civilian spacewalk, and with a new spacesuit and no airlock, it may also be the most dangerous spacewalk ever

The failure of Boeing's Starliner capsule has left two astronauts stuck in space for months – but also proved how private spaceflight can go right

The James Webb Space Telescope has spotted six strange worlds the size of planets that formed like stars – and the smallest may be building its own miniature solar system

The Milky Way may be home to strange black holes from the first moments of the universe, and the best candidates are the three closest black holes to Earth

Radio astronomers teamed up with SpaceX to find a promising solution for helping expensive telescopes avoid interference from thousands of Starlink satellites

Astronomers have identified patterns within the motion of stars stretching across the Milky Way, hinting at the presence of a vast wave

After a star explodes, the resulting supernova remnant collapses in on itself and could begin the cycle again, creating generations of stars enriched with heavy elements

Sam Howell tells New Scientist why NASA is so keen to visit Jupiter’s fourth-largest moon, Europa, and how the mission could help us figure out the likelihood of life elsewhere in the cosmos

The books, TV, games and more that New Scientist staff have enjoyed this week