The astonishing diversity of the cosmos is on display in the 2026 Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition, organised by the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London. From our own solar system to distant nebulae, these images showcase the many wonders we can observe from the ground on Earth.

The overall winner (above), The Quiet Predator, was taken by Ali Alobaidly in Kuwait. It shows a dense nebula 650 light years away, in the constellation Cepheus. This cloud of dust, called the Shark nebula, contains a few bright stars that make their surroundings glow blue. The nebula is so dark and distant that it took Alobaidly more than 28 hours of observing to create this image.

The runner-up in the competition (above) is Beyond the Wormhole, taken by Kfir Simon in Israel. While the image may evoke a hole in space-time, it actually depicts the centre of the Helix nebula, which is about 650 light years away in the constellation Aquarius. Beyond the central star that formed the nebula when it shed its outer layers thousands of years ago, extraordinarily distant galaxies shine through the dust and gas.

In the Our Moon category, Venusian Pearl on the Moon (above) took the prize. Petr Horalek took this photograph in the Czech Republic as the moon passed in front of Venus in the middle of the day. He captured this relatively rare event, called an occultation, just as Venus slipped behind the crescent moon.

The runner-up in the Our Sun section is, unsurprisingly, an image of the sun. However, Anatomy of the Chromosphere (above), captured by Peter Ward in Australia, isn鈥檛 a simple photograph. It represents two different wavelengths of light, one of which captures emission from hydrogen along the sun鈥檚 edges, represented in red, while the other shows emission from calcium, shown in lilac. Together, they reveal the structure of the sun鈥檚 chromosphere, which is the layer just above its visible surface, but below its corona.

Comet C/2025 A6 (Lemmon) jets across the sky in this highly commended image by Julien DeWinter and Landon Boehm, taken from Texas. When it was captured, in October 2025, the comet was almost at its closest point to the sun, about 101 million kilometres from Earth. That proximity to the sun caused remarkable activity on the comet, creating two long plumes, one made of dust and the other of electrically charged plasma.

With a more earthly setting, the winner of the Skyscapes category is Botswana Star Trail, taken by Stefano Pellegrini. It captures the movement of stars above a grove of baobab trees over the course of 340 camera exposures, each lasting 30 seconds.

The winning images from the competition will be exhibited at the National Maritime Museum in London from 18 September.

A newly formed crater on the moon is teaching us about our nearest neighbour鈥檚 complex geology. The crater, formed by an asteroid impact in 2024, is the largest that we鈥檝e 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 鈥� about 222 metres across 鈥� 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. 鈥淐ratering 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,鈥� says at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland. 鈥淗aving a baseline for a pristine crater that can serve as our calibration point for how these processes start is really incredible.鈥�

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. 鈥淥ver the last several years, we鈥檝e developed this understanding that these impacts modify more than just the region right where the crater is,鈥� says Powell. 鈥淚t鈥檚 really striking that a crater can modify the lunar surface to distances far larger than the crater itself.鈥�

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. 鈥淚f we鈥檙e trying to send rovers or astronauts or build things on the moon, we want to understand the properties of the surface,鈥� says Powell. And watching a huge new crater form and change over time is one of the best remote probes of the surface we鈥檝e ever had.

Researchers may have spotted the first signs of a dark matter particle. If the result is confirmed, it could be one of the most monumental discoveries in the history of physics.

Dark matter makes up about 85 per cent of matter in the universe, but for decades physicists have been unable to determine what it itself is made of. Hypotheses have ranged from different sorts of particles and forces to strangely behaving gravity and everything in between 鈥� but the leading idea has always been that of the weakly interacting massive particle, or WIMP. As we have built more and more powerful detectors to search for WIMPs, though, their failure to show up has led many to doubt their existence and move on to more exotic ideas.

That doubt may soon come to an end. A new analysis of data from the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment in South Dakota has revealed a single particle that may be the first WIMP ever detected. 鈥淭his result is certainly an exciting one, because it provides some potential positive hint for what dark matter could be, not just what dark matter could not be,鈥� says at Brown University in Rhode Island, who wasn鈥檛 part of the analysis.

LZ looks for dark matter using a 7-tonne tank of liquid xenon, surrounded by several layers of shielding and buried more than a kilometre down to keep out other types of particles. When an outside particle hits a xenon atom, it creates a tiny burst of light that is measured by sensitive detectors surrounding the tank. Researchers can then use that light to reconstruct the path of the incoming particle and the energy level of the interaction.

In the search for WIMPs, we generally look for events with energies below about 30 kiloelectronvolts (keV), says LZ spokesperson , also at Brown University. That assumes the simplest sort of interaction, in which the WIMP is essentially bouncing off an individual nucleon in the xenon nucleus. Having not found any hints of WIMPs in that energy range, the LZ team decided to reanalyse the first 220 days of data from the detector, searching for events with higher energies.

That is where they found their dark matter particle candidate, at about 248 keV. 鈥淵ou must never make an assumption that nature is going to do something the easy way,鈥� says Gaitskell. 鈥淣obody can accuse our universe of making the simplest and most natural-seeming choices.鈥�

Such a high-energy event can鈥檛 have come from the most simple type of interaction between a WIMP and a nucleon 鈥� instead, it must have happened through a more complicated coupling between the WIMP and the entire xenon nucleus. If that is the case, the WIMP must have a mass more than 200 times the mass of a proton.

鈥淚t鈥檚 not just that they鈥檙e seeing something, but that there鈥檚 a hint at what the underlying mechanism might be,鈥� says at the University of California, Berkeley, who wasn鈥檛 involved in the analysis. 鈥淚f this all stands up, our learning curve is going to be pretty steep from now on.鈥�

Actually detecting a dark matter particle could reveal some of the universe鈥檚 most closely held secrets, including information about the early universe that is otherwise nearly impossible to determine, and drastically shake up our standard model of particle physics. But as Haxton says, this detection is not yet certain.

In particle physics, the statistical threshold for a finding to go from an intriguing hint to a solid discovery is a number called 5 sigma, which means there is about a 1-in-3.5 million chance that a signal like this would show up as a fluke rather than a true sign of dark matter. Right now, this detection from LZ sits at 2.6 sigma, which means that there is about a 1-in-200 chance it could appear as a fluke.

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That might still seem fairly secure, but in the search for dark matter it is far from enough. 鈥淚n science we sit down and we do so many damned experiments, I鈥檓 afraid you come across a 1-in-100 event fairly often,鈥� says Gaitskell.

鈥淏efore one can declare victory, you need a few more data points, but now they have something to aim for, they know where to look,鈥� says Haxton. The good news is that this analysis only covered about one-third of the data that LZ has already taken, and other dark matter detectors around the world have their own data, as well. A few more events in the same energy range could bump the discovery of WIMPs up to 5 sigma 鈥� and change our understanding of physics and the universe forever.

A star near the centre of the Milky Way is hurtling through its orbit with a peak speed of more than 8 per cent the speed of light, making it both the fastest star and the closest to a supermassive black hole that has ever been spotted. Named S301, this astonishing star could help us unravel the secrets of gravity.

at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany and his colleagues found S301 using the Very Large Telescope in Chile. They have been watching it since 2023 to get enough data to pin down its orbit, and the results are unprecedented.

At its closest approach, S301 is only about 1.8 billion kilometres from Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy. That鈥檚 just 12 times the distance between Earth and the sun, 10 times closer to Sagittarius A* than the previous record-holder. 鈥淚f you were living on a planet around this star, the size of the black hole at the closest approach would appear similar to the full moon from Earth 鈥� it would be absolutely stunning,鈥� says Gillessen.

Such a close pass by the black hole means that S301 spends part of its orbit in one of the most extreme gravitational environments in the universe. Next to a black hole, space-time stretches and warps. If a black hole is spinning, it should warp space-time even more, twisting it up in what is known as the frame-dragging effect.

鈥淓arth does this as well, and we can measure with satellites around Earth that there is a very, very slight frame dragging from Earth鈥檚 rotation,鈥� says at the University of California, Los Angeles, who wasn鈥檛 involved in the research. 鈥淭his is doing the same thing, just with much different objects.鈥�

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Measuring Earth鈥檚 spin is relatively easy, but a black hole鈥檚 spin is much harder to determine because of its lack of a visible surface. The most precise way to measure it would be by measuring frame dragging, and S301 is the first star close enough to feel that effect.

鈥淲e drop a leaf in the wind and see how the air is moving by measuring that leaf,鈥� says Gillessen. 鈥淎 star is just the perfect leaf to drop to see the movement of space-time.鈥�

Actually measuring the spin of Sagittarius A* using this method will probably take around a decade, he says, but that may speed up if we find more stars like it.

鈥淲ith one star, it would take a while, but it would still be the best constraint on spin that we鈥檝e ever had by far,鈥� says at University College London. 鈥淚f you can find another star that鈥檚 even closer, that鈥檚 better still. If you can find a population of these stars, then you鈥檙e in business.鈥�

Gillessen and his team have several candidates for stars slightly further from the black hole than S301, but none yet that are closer, he says.

But when we finally do measure the spin of a black hole, it will be a crucial piece of the cosmic jigsaw. It will not only help us understand how black holes have contributed to the evolution of the universe, but will also provide a probe into the behaviour of gravity in extreme environments, which has proved extremely difficult to study.

鈥淎 black hole only has three measurable properties: a mass, a spin and possibly an electric charge. The mass was worth a Nobel prize in 2020, so, if you find the spin, you might expect a call from Stockholm in 20 years,鈥� says Gillessen.