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The European Space Agency reported Oct. 8, 2026, that its Solar Orbiter spacecraft has traced one of the solar wind's magnetic kinks back to its birthplace on the Sun. The spacecraft flew through a…
Researchers using Europe's Mars Express orbiter report that their Mars weather model could reproduce a long water-ice cloud over a Martian volcano only once they allowed water vapor to freeze…
The shape was wrong. A light curve, the record of how a point of light brightens and fades, is supposed to look like a bell or a wave. This one looked like a triangle, and it repeated. Kevin Burdge,…
A team of astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) reports the first detection in space of fully deuterated methanol, found in the gas around a star that is still…
Cosmologists have used a large simulation of how galaxies form to estimate where in the universe planets have the best chance of staying habitable, and they report that the Milky Way of today is…
Deep images from the Gemini North telescope have resolved the spoke-like filaments of the supernova remnant Pa 30 into cascades of small knots. In light emitted by sulfur, the images show about ten…
A reanalysis of ultraviolet spectra the Hubble Space Telescope took in 1999 has found the white dwarf HS 0209+0832, the burnt-out core of a dead star, pulling in material that matches nothing in the…
X-ray astronomers have spent decades watching V4641 Sagittarii at its loudest. The system is a black hole pulling gas off a companion star in the constellation Sagittarius, and every few years it…
Carlos del Burgo Olivares and colleagues report that ultraviolet light and warming turn frozen hydrogen sulfide into solid rings and chains of sulfur in laboratory ice, and that adding water ice…
Astronomers have measured the oxygen in nine of the earliest known galaxies directly, instead of inferring it from the indirect calibrations the field normally falls back on at these distances.…
A new cosmological simulation reproduces a pattern astronomers have already measured in the Milky Way's faintest companion galaxies, and its authors attribute that pattern to the explosions of the…
Isaac Newton thought the planetary order was mortal. Three centuries of celestial mechanics answered him, and kept answering: the four giant planets are so securely spaced that chaos alone would need…