Space & Future
Ancient Meteorite Dust Reveals Magnetism May Have Helped Build Our Sun
About 4.6 billion years ago, our solar system looked nothing like it does today. Instead of a sun surrounded by planets, it began as...
Astronomers Discover 4 Strange Planets Around One of Our Closest Stars
Astronomers have taken their most detailed look yet at a fascinating group of small planets orbiting Barnard’s Star, one of the closest stars to...
Why a Planet’s Slow Spin Could Turn It into a Scorching World Like Venus
Why did Earth become a comfortable home for life while its similar-sized neighbor Venus turned into a scorching world with a crushing atmosphere?
Scientists think...
Astronomers Find a Flaw in a Cosmic Yardstick Used for 50 Years
For more than half a century, astronomers have relied on a basic assumption when estimating the number of stars inside distant galaxies: stars of...
Dry Martian Meteorite Reveals Early Water in Mars’s Crust
Billions of years ago, Mars was hypothesized to have been a habitable world with flowing liquid water and the potential for life.
But directly studying...
Mysterious Gravitational Waves May Be Echoes of Ancient Dark Stars
A faint gravitational-wave signal spreading across the universe may contain clues about mysterious stars that existed more than 13 billion years ago, according to...
Hidden Stars Reveal Early Galaxies Were Far Bigger Than We Thought
Some of the earliest massive galaxies in the universe may be hiding enormous numbers of small, faint stars, suggesting they contain much more mass...
One Giant Asteroid Impact May Have Reshaped Mars’ Tiny Moon Deimos
A single asteroid impact may have dramatically reshaped Deimos, the smaller of Mars' two moons, creating both a huge depression near its south pole...
Dying Galaxies Reveal What Happens After Black Hole Jets Switch Off
Astronomers have discovered a group of faint "dying" radio galaxies that could change our understanding of what happens after supermassive black holes stop producing...
Mars Dust Could Threaten Astronauts’ Lungs, NASA Warns
Future astronauts exploring Mars will face a danger that may be much harder to avoid than extreme cold or radiation: dust.
NASA has released a...
Hubble Discovers a Lost Galaxy Swallowed by the Milky Way 11.8 Billion Years Ago
The Milky Way has not always been the enormous spiral galaxy we see today. Like many large galaxies, it grew partly by swallowing smaller...
Scientists Solve Key Mysteries Behind Supernovae and X-Ray Bursts
Scientists have made two important nuclear measurements that could help explain what happens inside some of the most powerful explosions in the universe.
In two...
Deep Space
When two ‘failed stars’ team up to light the sky
Brown dwarfs are often called “failed stars” because they are too small to keep nuclear fusion going in their cores, the process that makes...
Our solar system may have captured alien comets
According to the most popular theory, proposed by Dutch astronomer Jan Oort, during a very early phase of the solar system’s formation, the giant...
Astronomers find the missing matter in our Milky Way galaxy
Astronomers have for the first time used distant galaxies as 'scintillating pins' to locate and identify a piece of the Milky Way's missing matter.
For...
Gravity vs. magnetism: How the universe shapes giant stars
Astronomers have taken their clearest look yet at how some of the biggest stars in our galaxy are born—and it turns out the process...
NASA gets a rare look at a rocky exoplanet’s surface
A new study using data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope provides a rare glimpse of conditions on the surface of a rocky planet orbiting...