Webb has assembled the first real catalogue of planet-shattering collisions: 21 dust-filled systems that between them show the last violent act of rocky planet building. Elsewhere this week, CHIME mapped the early Universe's hydrogen entirely on its own for the first time, the Einstein Probe caught a ten-minute X-ray flash that may mark a magnetar's birth, and Haumea turned out to have a dense rocky core.

Hubble ultraviolet spectra of 29 metal-poor massive stars show their winds slowing far more sharply than models assumed, which matters for how we read JWST's puzzling early galaxies. Yale meteorite work finds the outer Solar System's first planetesimals were built from 83 to 92 per cent chondrules rather than icy dust, and a new simulation suggests the black holes that wandered away from their galaxy's centre carry the clearest record of its past. We close with NGC 4698, a Virgo spiral rotating out of step with itself.

Astronomers have confirmed Elias 2-24 b, a Jupiter-mass world less than a million years old that is still gathering material inside a gap in its star's disc, making it comfortably the youngest planet ever found. We also look at new supercomputer simulations suggesting Webb's puzzling little red dots are fast-growing black hole seeds, a white dwarf that came back from the dead as a Wolf-Rayet star, and why Venus was never going to keep a moon.

Cosmologists have merged the two largest Type Ia supernova collections into a single 2,884 strong sample, and the combined data once again hint that dark energy may be changing over cosmic time rather than holding steady. Elsewhere this week, Hubble and Webb teamed up to catch 27 of the smallest icy bodies ever seen beyond Neptune, spectroscopy of the plasma tail of 3I/ATLAS pointed to an extraordinarily cold birthplace around another star, and JWST set the tightest limit yet on moons orbiting an exoplanet. Four quiet results, four small corrections to the picture.

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A central prediction of Einstein’s theory of general relativity is that black holes are quite simple bodies. Their nature can be fully described by just their mass and their spin-rate.

The Λ-Cold Dark Matter (ΛCDM) model successfully explains many large-scale cosmological phenomena, but the early presence of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) still poses a major challenge.

In addition to electromagnetic radiation, the Sun emits an intense stream of charged particles including protons, electrons and alpha particles.

Organic molecules play a central role in understanding the past habitability of Mars. These are compounds built primarily from carbon that serve as the foundation of life on Earth.

Singularities appear in many theories, as points where physical quantities diverge. In most cases, these are not seen as physically real, but rather a consequence of the mathematical tools we use to describe nature.

Current models of white dwarf evolution suggest that the most massive examples are the consequence of a previous stellar merger.

The space between galaxies in a cluster is not entirely dark. Scattered across these vast regions is a faint, diffuse glow known as intracluster light (ICL).