Space

Space
A Third Planet Was Hiding in the Sky's Most Famous Planetary System
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,…
By Victor Kuklin3w ago4 min read
Space
Mars Runs a Shrunken Version of Earth's Aurora Engine, MAVEN Finds
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…
By Diana Brinker3w ago4 min read
Space
Seismometers Built to Feel Earthquakes Are Now Catching Shooting Stars
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…
By Victor Kuklin3w ago5 min read
Space
The Rock That Remembers Mars's Most Violent Era
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…
By Kristopher R. Jeffay3w ago3 min read
Space
A Pulsar, a White Dwarf and a Third Star That Is Still Burning
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…
By Diana Brinker3w ago5 min read
Space
A New Telescope Network Catches Meteoroids Hitting the Moon, Ahead of the Seismometers That Will Feel Them
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…
By Diana Brinker3w ago5 min read
Space
Twelve Years Under the South Pole Push the Milky Way's Neutrino Signal Past Five Sigma
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…
By Victor Kuklin4w ago5 min read
Space
Several Satellite Constellations Already Exceed the Size at Which Their Debris Turns Unstable, or Runs Away
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…
By Victor Kuklin4w ago5 min read
Space
An Honest Map of Mars's Buried Ice, Including the Places Where the Answer Is 'We Don't Know'
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…
By Kristopher R. Jeffay4w ago5 min read
Space
Clay in Neptune's Rings Came From Inside a World That No Longer Exists
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:…
By Diana Brinker4w ago6 min read
Space
The Rogue Black Hole That Gave Itself Away by Eating a Star
A black hole with nothing to eat is, for observational purposes, absent. No disk of hot gas, no X-rays, no jet. Theory says big galaxies should be littered with them: black holes knocked loose from a…
By Victor Kuklin1mo ago5 min read
Space
A Hidden Giant May Orbit Tabby's Star, but the Signal Is Faint
Few stars have carried as much baggage as KIC 8462852. Better known as Tabby's star, after astronomer Tabetha Boyajian, it made headlines in 2015 for dimming in ways no ordinary planet could produce:…
By Kristopher R. Jeffay1mo ago3 min read

Browse by topic

By format

About

Space

A Third Planet Was Hiding in the Sky's Most Famous Planetary System

Mars Runs a Shrunken Version of Earth's Aurora Engine, MAVEN Finds

Seismometers Built to Feel Earthquakes Are Now Catching Shooting Stars

The Rock That Remembers Mars's Most Violent Era

A Pulsar, a White Dwarf and a Third Star That Is Still Burning

A New Telescope Network Catches Meteoroids Hitting the Moon, Ahead of the Seismometers That Will Feel Them

Twelve Years Under the South Pole Push the Milky Way's Neutrino Signal Past Five Sigma

Several Satellite Constellations Already Exceed the Size at Which Their Debris Turns Unstable, or Runs Away

An Honest Map of Mars's Buried Ice, Including the Places Where the Answer Is 'We Don't Know'

Clay in Neptune's Rings Came From Inside a World That No Longer Exists

The Rogue Black Hole That Gave Itself Away by Eating a Star

A Hidden Giant May Orbit Tabby's Star, but the Signal Is Faint