Space & Future
A Dry Martian Meteorite Reveals Where Water Once Hid on Mars
Mars may look like a dry, dusty world today, but billions of years ago, water interacted with its rocky surface.
Now, scientists have found new...
Chemical Fingerprints Reveal the Secret Pasts of Massive Stars
A massive star may look like it has spent its entire life alone, but its chemical makeup can tell a very different story.
Scientists have...
Astronomers Discover a Stellar Stream Beyond the Milky Way for the First Time
Astronomers have discovered a faint stream of stars in another galaxy for the first time, opening a new way to investigate one of the...
Astronomers Find Three Giant Black Holes in One Ancient Galaxy for the First Time
Astronomers have discovered three actively feeding supermassive black holes inside a single distant galaxy, something never before seen so far back in the history...
Astronomers Catch a Dying Star Recycling Its Material Back into Space
Astronomers have captured a remarkable view of a dying star's remains being broken apart and mixed into the space between stars.
The discovery offers a...
A Blazar 1.5 Billion Light-Years Away Is Challenging What Astronomers Thought They Knew
About 1.5 billion light-years from Earth, a galaxy called PKS 2155-304 is giving astronomers more questions than answers.
After studying nearly two decades of observations,...
Astronomers Release the Largest 2D Map of the Universe Ever Made
Astronomers have released the largest two-dimensional color map of the universe ever created, containing an extraordinary 5.6 trillion pixels and nearly 4 billion stars,...
Rare Mars Meteorite Fills a 2-Billion-Year Gap in the Red Planet’s History
A rare meteorite from Mars is giving scientists a new look at a mysterious period in the Red Planet’s history.
Researchers at Boston College have...
Super-Earths May Be Surprisingly Solid Deep Inside, Scientists Find
Massive rocky planets known as super-Earths may be much more solid deep inside than scientists previously understood, according to new research into how minerals...
Uranus’s Magnetic Shield “Breathes” as the Planet Spins
Uranus is one of the strangest planets in our solar system, and new research shows that its unusual orientation causes the planet’s magnetic environment...
Trillion-Mile Gas Stream May Explain a Bizarre Triple-Star System
Astronomers have discovered an enormous stream of gas flowing toward a young system of three stars, potentially explaining why its planet-forming disks are strangely...
20 Years of Watching a Blazar Reveals Something Stranger Than Expected
After nearly two decades of observations, astronomers have discovered that a distant blazar behaves in ways that leading theories struggle to explain.
Instead of solving...
Deep Space
Scientists uncover clues to cosmic history through asteroid Ryugu’s samples
The Japanese Space Agency's Hayabusa2 spacecraft embarked on an intriguing journey, reaching the asteroid Ryugu in June 2018.
Its mission?
To collect samples from this celestial...
If wormholes exist, this is how we might find one
A new study outlines a method for detecting wormholes, which form a passage between two separate regions of spacetime.
The speculative phenomenon that has long...
NASA’s Fermi detects first gamma-ray eclipses from spider star systems
Scientists have discovered the first gamma-ray eclipses from a special type of binary star system using data from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope.
An interstellar visitor helped shape the orbits of the planets
The orbits of the planets around the Sun have been the source for many a scientific debate.
Their current orbital properties are well understood but...
Ice on Moon’s south pole may have more than one source, says study
The discovery of ice deposits in craters scattered across the Moon's south pole has helped to renew interest in exploring the lunar surface, but...