Space & Future
The solar system loses an ocean world
Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, may not have a subsurface ocean after all.
That’s according to a re-examination of data captured by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, which...
Why the same galaxy can grow or decline—It depends on its neighbor
Galaxies may look serene from afar, but their lives are shaped by powerful internal structures and by the neighbors they keep.
A new study led...
Scientists crack 1.4-billion-year-old salt crystals to reveal Earth’s ancient air
More than a billion years before dinosaurs—and long before plants and animals—Earth looked very different.
In what is now northern Ontario, a shallow, salty lake...
Webb spots the ‘smoke’ from crashing exocomets around a nearby star
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was involved in yet another first discovery recently available in pre-print form on arXiv from Cicero Lu at...
Scientists solve a big bang theory puzzle that could point to dark matter
For years, one of the most intriguing mysteries in physics has been dark matter—an invisible substance thought to make up most of the matter...
Astronomers discover the violent origin of mysterious blue cosmic explosions
For years, astronomers have been puzzled by rare and dramatic flashes of blue and ultraviolet light that suddenly appear in distant galaxies and then...
Astronomers find the first compelling evidence of monster stars in the early universe
One of the greatest mysteries the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was developed to investigate was the birth of supermassive black holes (SMBHs).
For more...
A year that mattered: Caltech’s scientific journey in 2025
Caltech is a place unlike any other, an Institute that is truly "small but mighty."
Its small size and the expertise of its community enable...
The Milky Way had a wild past, and Webb is finally revealing it
How did the Milky Way become the calm, spiral galaxy we see today?
New observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) suggest that our...
Gaia space telescope spots possible planets forming around baby stars
How do planets like Earth and Jupiter come into existence?
Astronomers are beginning to answer that question thanks to new observations from the European Space...
NASA’s Perseverance Rover is ready for many more miles—and new discoveries on Mars
After nearly five years on Mars, NASA’s Perseverance rover is proving it was built to last.
Since landing in February 2021, the six-wheeled robot has...
Astronomers witness a violent space collision around a nearby star
Astronomers have captured something extraordinary: the aftermath of a violent collision between large space rocks in another planetary system.
Using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, scientists...
Deep Space
Orbital resonance − the striking gravitational dance done by planets with aligning orbits
Planets orbit their parent stars while separated by enormous distances – in our solar system, planets are like grains of sand in a region...
This weird exoplanet looks like a cousin of Planet Nine
Astronomers are still searching for a hypothetical “Planet Nine” in the distant reaches of our solar system, but an exoplanet 336 light years from...
Life elements could have been generated in asteroids, shows NASA study
Using new analyses, scientists have just found the last two of the five informational units of DNA and RNA that had yet to be...
About a third of supermassive black holes are hiding
Supermassive black holes can have trillions of times more mass than the Sun, only exist in specific locations, and could number in the trillions.
How...
How did supermassive black holes form?
We don’t quite understand how the first supermassive black holes formed so quickly in the young universe.
So, a team of physicists are proposing a...