Space

Two reference models of Venus's atmosphere disagree with 18 years of spacecraft temperature measurements by more than 10 K, or 10 degrees Celsius, according to a paper posted to the arXiv preprint…

Mars has lost most of its air. Its krypton, though, is essentially where it started — a heavy noble gas still sitting in what is left of an atmosphere that a young Sun's wind spent hundreds of…

WASP-39 b is one of the most-studied planets outside our solar system, a puffy hot Jupiter roughly 700 light-years away that became a showcase target for JWST early in the telescope's life. So it…

A handful of supermassive black holes have been caught doing something no textbook asked them to do. Every few days they switch on, flood their surroundings with X-rays, then switch off again. Days…

The star blew up when the universe was about a quarter of its present age, and by the time its light reached Earth it should have been a smudge: too faint to take a spectrum of, too faint to follow…

Point a telescope at a nearby star and, mostly, the star is all you get. The ring of rock, boulders and collision dust around it — the leftover scaffolding of planet building, the same kind of belt…

A rock came off the East Antarctic Ice Sheet in 2008. Cataloged as DOM 08006, for the Dominion Range where it was collected, it is one of the most primitive meteorites ever recovered, a lump that…

Twelve nearby stars near the top of the target list for NASA's Habitable Worlds Observatory expose their habitable zones to 10 to 100 times as much X-ray and extreme-ultraviolet radiation as the…

NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope lifted off at 7:26 a.m. EDT Sunday aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy from Launch Complex 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the agency reported on its…

In June a camera on the Gran Telescopio Canarias stared for two nights at a patch of sky beside the spiral galaxy M94. Ignacio Trujillo, who led the observation from the Instituto de Astrofísica de…

Follow the Moon through a month and its brightness does something that simple arithmetic cannot account for. It climbs as the lit crescent fattens, roughly in step with the growing area of sunlit…

Thirteen transiting giant exoplanets observed by JWST fall on the same color-magnitude sequence as free-floating brown dwarfs at similar temperatures, and the methane expected in the planets'…