Space, in brief

A space rock hit the Moon between 11 April and 22 May 2024. It dug a crater 222 metres wide and 43 metres deep. [1][3]

It is the largest newly formed crater found anywhere in the solar system. The previous record for a new crater on the Moon was 70 metres wide. [2]

The rock was a piece of an asteroid or a comet. NASA says it was possibly the size of a three- to six-storey building. [2][3]

No telescope on Earth or in space saw the hit happen. [4] NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), a spacecraft that has circled the Moon since 2009, had photographed the spot before and after. [4]

LRO's wide camera photographs the whole Moon every month. Comparing two months taken under similar sunlight shows what has changed. [2]

Robert Wagner, an image specialist at Intuitive Machines, a Texas space company, noticed a bright patch with a dark ring around it during a routine check of the data. [3]

The pictures were not flagged until August 2025, more than a year after the hit. [4]

Models say a hit this big should strike the Moon about once every 132 years. [2][4]

The crash threw dust and rock more than 100 kilometres across the surface, and at a steeper angle than scientists expected. [4]

A second team found a patch 7 kilometres wide around the crater that is about 9 degrees Celsius colder at night. The hit fluffed up the soil, so it now loses heat faster. [3][5]

The crater sits near the Moon's eastern edge, just inside the rim of a huge old basin called Crisium, where dark lava plains meet brighter highlands. [2][3]

LRO has found at least 1,000 new craters in 17 years. Most are far smaller, and the smallest it can pick out are about 9 metres wide. [3]

The two studies came out on 16 September in the journal Science Advances. [1][4] The crater is named after Thomas McGetchin, a former director of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston. [4]

The scientists say knowing how far a big hit disturbs the ground will help plan where rovers drive and where astronauts build. [3][5]

Why it matters. The teams now treat McGetchin as a starting point, so the next thing to watch is how fast LRO's pictures show its bright splash and cold patch fading. [5]

SpaceX said on 17 September that its first try at flying Starship into orbit moves to 28 September, six days later than planned. [6] It gave no reason. [6] Starship is the giant reusable rocket SpaceX is building for the Moon and Mars. Its 13 earlier flights all stopped just short of orbit. [6] This flight is meant to circle Earth six times about 275 kilometres up, release 26 larger Starlink internet satellites, and come down in the Pacific west of Chile about 10 hours after launch. [6][7]

Why it matters. SpaceX says reaching orbit has to come first before it can start reusing the whole rocket quickly. [6] The booster will again splash into the Gulf of Mexico, after the last one in July had ice clog three engines and hit the water hard. [7]

Astronomers confirmed a planet less than a million years old, the youngest ever found, in a study out on 16 September. [8][9] The planet, Elias 2-24 b, is about as heavy as Jupiter. [9] It sits 450 light-years away, in a gap in the dusty disc around its young star, where earlier telescopes had hinted a planet might be. [9] A team led by Andrea Bernardi, in Chile, found it in old images from the Keck Observatory in Hawaii. [8] The youngest planets known before were all over 5 million years old. [8]

Why it matters. Planet-building models already struggled to explain the older record holders, co-author Lucas Cieza said, and this one shows they are missing some steps. [8] The authors expect NASA's Roman telescope, which carries an instrument that blocks out starlight, to find planets like this more easily. [9]

NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, launched on 30 August, has turned on its main camera for the first time. [10] The Wide Field Instrument is a 300-megapixel camera for infrared light, the heat glow our eyes cannot see. [10] Engineers first let it dry out for about 10 days. [10] On 11 September they turned off a heater so it could cool to about minus 143 degrees Celsius, cold enough to turn its detectors on. [10] On 13 September the team confirmed the parts that focus it were working. [10]

Why it matters. Roman's second instrument, which blocks a star's light to see its planets, passed its first remote tests and will now spend 30 days letting water and chemicals leave its surfaces. [10] The telescope still has about 12 weeks to go before it reaches its working spot far beyond the Moon, and science starts after another month of tests. [10]

A study published on 10 September suggests the Sun may have swallowed a planet five to ten times heavier than Earth early in its life. [11] The team, led by Mutlu Yildiz of Ege University in Turkey, ran computer models of how the Sun has aged. [11] Adding a swallowed planet helped explain three things the usual models get slightly wrong. [11] They are how deep the Sun's churning outer layer goes, how fast sound travels just below it, and why its surface holds so little lithium. [11]

Why it matters. Planets a few times heavier than Earth are common around other stars, and our solar system has none, so this would be one reason why. [11] It is still only a model: the authors say something else could explain the gaps, and the next step is to look for the planet's chemical mark inside the Sun. [11]