Space

In March 1974, as Mariner 10 swept past Mercury for the first time, its instruments recorded something nobody had ordered: bursts of energetic electrons, arriving in gusts, around a planet that had…

Tucked inside a glowing bubble of gas roughly 26,000 light-years away, in a crowded patch of the Milky Way called Sagittarius C, a faint blue smudge of X-rays has caught astronomers' attention. They…

For years, the search for atmospheres on rocky exoplanets has mostly returned bad news. The small worlds that orbit red dwarfs sit close to stars that flare hard and blast them with radiation, and…

The Hills mechanism leaves two fossils, and astronomers have never been able to point at both halves of the same pair. A binary drifts too close to Sagittarius A*, the black hole of about four…

For decades, every thermometer pointed at Io read the same thing: its skin. Infrared cameras aboard Galileo, and more recently Juno's own JIRAM instrument, catch the glow of the surface and the lava…

Researchers reconstructed a December 2024 solar eruption from the records of 17 spacecraft across the inner solar system and found a component that traveled toward Earth invisible from the Sun-Earth…

Simulations of a star repeatedly stripped by a supermassive black hole reproduce a pattern astronomers have observed but models had not, provided the star was already spinning rapidly before its…

NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) has flagged a G2, or moderate, geomagnetic storm for roughly July 3, after two coronal mass ejections (vast clouds of solar plasma and magnetic field)…

A single glancing impact by a 320-meter asteroid can account for both the 10-kilometer-wide depression at Deimos's south pole and the fine debris covering the whole 12-kilometer moon, according to…

Radar waves at a wavelength of 3.5 centimeters penetrate no more than about 32 meters into Europa's surface, according to a bound reported by Tunhui Xie, Jean-Luc Margot and six co-authors from 13…

The first JWST transit spectra of TRAPPIST-1 f rule out hydrogen- and helium-dominated atmospheres with surface pressures higher than about 20 millibars, at 95% confidence, a team led by Olivia Lim…

Microbes carried to the Moon on astronauts and their equipment could stay alive in shaded ground around the lunar south pole, NASA scientists report in a modeling study published Aug. 19 in Science…