Space

Every 34 hours, a giant planet slips across the face of a dead star. The star is WD 1856+534, a white dwarf no bigger than Earth. It is the smoldering core left behind after a Sun-like star exhausted…

Beta Pictoris has been the poster child of exoplanet astronomy since before most exoplanets could be seen at all. In 1984 it gave astronomers their first image of a dusty disk around another star,…

For decades the recipe for an aurora seemed to demand something Mars simply does not have: a planet-sized magnetic field. Earth's aurora is fed by one. So is Jupiter's, and Saturn's. Mars lost its…

On a night in April 2025, something bright tore across the sky over the Adriatic. To the few people who looked up in time, it was a fireball: a fragment of interplanetary rock burning through the…

The Associated Press reports that South Korea's Danuri orbiter has photographed the patch of the Moon where a derelict SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage crashed on 5 August, returning images of the same…

Earth has almost no memory of its own violent childhood. Plate tectonics keeps recycling the crust, erasing the scars of the asteroid barrage that battered every young world in the inner Solar…

Supernovae are hard on families. When a massive star collapses and blows off its outer layers, the sudden loss of mass and the kick delivered to the remnant usually wreck whatever gravitational…

Somewhere on the Moon, a rock the size of a fist arrives at tens of kilometers per second and stops. There is no atmosphere to slow it and nothing to burn it up on the way, so all of that energy has…

Cosmic rays arrive at Earth with no return address. They are charged particles, and the Galaxy is threaded with magnetic fields, so by the time one reaches an instrument its direction says nothing…

Ask a national regulator whether a satellite is safe to launch and you will get an answer about that satellite. Will it come down within the required window? Can it be steered out of somebody else's…

Every so often a meteorite punches through the dust of the Martian midlatitudes and leaves something startling behind: a splash of bright white ice at the bottom of a fresh crater, visible from orbit…

Ryleigh Davis was not looking for clay. She and her colleagues at Caltech had aimed the James Webb Space Telescope at Neptune's rings and three of its small inner moons to answer a plainer question:…