Space & Future

Scientists discover two giant planets fluffier than cotton candy

Astronomers have discovered two of the fluffiest planets ever found. These giant worlds are so light and airy that they are actually less dense than...

NASA’s Hubble discovers ancient galaxy that helped clear the universe’s primordial fog

Astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have made an unexpected discovery that sheds new light on one of the universe’s greatest transformations. They detected ultraviolet...

Mysterious ‘dark force’ may actually slow the growth of cosmic structures

Dark matter is one of the biggest mysteries in science. It cannot be seen directly because it does not emit, absorb, or reflect light. Yet...

Astronomers discover giant ‘bow and arrow’ galaxy stretching 1.8 million light-years across

Astronomers have discovered a strange and spectacular galaxy that looks like a giant bow and arrow stretching across space. The unusual object, named RAD-BAARG (Bow-And-Arrow...

The long-lived Chicxulub hydrothermal system lasted 8 million years

When a massive, ten-kilometer asteroid slammed into Earth about 66 million years ago, it created a massive crater. The impact triggered a megatsunami and a...

Did gravitational tides cause Earth’s extinctions?

Life on Earth took a long evolutionary journey that eventually created us, the purportedly intelligent species that dominates the planet. But there was no grand...

Scientists discover magnetic fields guiding the birth of stars

How do stars form? Scientists know that stars are born when huge clouds of cold gas in space collapse under their own gravity. But one mystery...

Scientists Warn Some Earth Pathogens May Survive a Journey to Mars

Could microbes from Earth survive on other worlds? New research suggests that the answer may be yes. Ph.D. candidate Tommaso Zaccaria studied whether tiny organisms...

Iconic cosmic collision challenges long-held ideas about dark matter

The Bullet Cluster is one of the most famous objects in astronomy. For years, many scientists have considered it one of the strongest pieces of...

Scientists find a new way to search for ancient life on Mars using ‘mirror’...

Billions of years ago, Mars looked very different from the cold, dry world we see today. Scientists believe the Red Planet once had a...

Mysterious cosmic rays are challenging what scientists thought they knew about the universe

Millions of years ago, a massive star exploded somewhere far away in our galaxy. During this violent event, called a supernova, the dying star blasted...

The universe’s famous ‘pink planet’ has salty clouds in its sky

Astronomers have discovered an unexpected surprise on the famous “Pink Planet,” a strange world known as GJ504b. Using the powerful James Webb Space Telescope (JWST),...

Deep Space

The amazing changes in Saturn’s weather as it enters autumn

Scientists have been using a super-advanced telescope called the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to look at Saturn, and what they've found is both...

Will Titan finally answer, ‘Are we alone’?

We recently examined how and why Jupiter’s moon, Europa, could answer the longstanding question: Are we alone? While this small icy world gives plenty of...

NASA’s Psyche asteroid mission a 3.6 billion kilometre ‘journey to the centre of the...

Psyche was the Greek goddess of the soul, born a mere mortal and later married to Eros, the God of love. Who knows why the...

Scientists find the third-nearest star with a planet—and it’s rocky like Earth

In the past two decades, scientists have discovered more and more planets orbiting distant stars—but in some sense, they’re still just dots on a...

Astronomers spot one of the earliest galaxy clusters ever discovered

Astronomers using two of NASA’s most powerful space telescopes have discovered a massive cluster of galaxies forming much earlier in the universe than scientists...