If you look up on a clear night, the brightest and largest object in the sky will probably be the moon. And unless you have a decent telescope, it is the only natural satellite you can see with your own eyes. As a result, most people have a warped perception of what a moon is … Read more
The monster black hole at the center of our galaxy may be unleashing huge, gassy explosions — and now, astronomers think they’ve pinpointed the exact spot where that superheated gas is spilling into the Milky Way. Acting like a gargantuan exhaust vent, the newly discovered feature is a bright region of X-ray energy that’s nearly … Read more
The NASA’s JWST telescope has discovered what could be the earliest star clusters in the universe. JWST spotted the five proto-globular clusters — swarms of millions of stars bound together by gravity — inside the Cosmic Gems arc, a galaxy that formed just 460 million years after the Big Bang. The Cosmic Gems arc gets … Read more
The sun is on the verge of a significant event: a magnetic field reversal. This phenomenon happens roughly every 11 years and marks an important stage in the solar cycle. The shift in polarity indicates the halfway point of solar maximum, the height of solar activity, and the beginning of the shift toward solar minimum. … Read more
The James Webb Space Telescope has discovered the oldest and most distant supernova ever seen — a stellar explosion that took place when the universe was just 1.8 billion years old. The ancient starburst was uncovered among 80 others in a patch of sky that, from our perspective on Earth, is about the width of … Read more
Scientists believe Earth may have briefly lost protection from the sun around two million years ago, left to endure the extreme environment of interstellar space as the solar system passed through a dense cloud of gas and dust between stars. At that time, early human ancestors shared our planet with prehistoric animals like mastodons and … Read more
The “Eye of the Sahara” — also known as the “Eye of Africa” or the Richat structure — is a giant rock dome, carved with concentric rings, that looks like a giant bullseye when seen from above. The eye is visible from space and has been known to astronauts and scientists since the earliest crewed … Read more
A planet beyond the solar system that has been compared to Spock’s homeworld Vulcan in the Star Trek franchise may have been nothing more than an illusion caused by a jittery star. The extrasolar planet or “exoplanet” (a term for a planet outside of our solar system) was proposed to orbit a star called 40 … Read more
One of the most extraordinary stories of human migration unfolded around 70,000 years ago, as humans crossed from Southeast Asia into modern-day Australia, traversing a now-submerged, Atlantis-like landscape, and becoming the first people to call that land home. A rich archaeological record provides ample evidence that this happened. But researchers have long been stumped by … Read more
Scientists have identified a water-loss mechanism on Venus that could explain how the once water-rich world became completely parched. In the newly identified process, linked to a previously overlooked molecule high in Venus’ atmosphere, water escaped Venus at double the rate previously estimated. As faster water loss means less time is needed to boil away … Read more
