4+ hour, 38+ min ago  (184+ words) There is something quietly reassuring about a scientific mystery that gets solved not by a dramatic new discovery, but by simply looking again, more carefully, at something we thought we already understood. That’s exactly what has happened with the Sun,…...

2+ day, 17+ hour ago  (123+ words) As far as we know, food doesn’t exist naturally in space. We have to bring it with us if we want to explore the final frontier. One of the oldest and most common types of food on planet Earth is…...

2+ week, 5+ day ago  (397+ words) Searching for habitable worlds beyond our solar system consists of more than just having it orbit within its star’s habitable zone, which is the region where temperatures could be just right for liquid water to exist on the surface. On…...

3+ week, 3+ hour ago  (712+ words) Astronomers have found two of the lightest worlds ever discovered, a pair of giant planets so wispy that, gram for gram, they are less dense than candy floss. Each is roughly the size of Jupiter yet holds almost nothing inside…...

3+ week, 3+ hour ago  (142+ words) What happens to a star after a black hole eats it? You might assume the answer is simple: a brief, brilliant flare as the star is torn apart, then silence as the black hole settles back into the dark. For…...

3+ week, 2+ day ago  (360+ words) When Artemis II swept around the far side of the Moon this April, carrying the first humans beyond Earth orbit in more than fifty years, NASA had prepared its four astronauts for something more than flying the spacecraft. It had…...

3+ week, 3+ day ago  (103+ words) The ESA's Euclid space telescope took 26 hours to capture this portrait of the Milky Way's central bulge. This isn't part of its primary mission; instead it's kind of like bonus science. It'll be used in the Roman Space Telescope's gravitational…...

3+ week, 4+ day ago  (104+ words) We’ve known for a long time that there are organic molecules on Mars. Rovers and landers keep turning them up wherever they look. But, “organic” simply means a molecule is made up of carbon and hydrogen atoms, not that it…...

3+ week, 6+ day ago  (83+ words) Astronomers have detected a flickering quasar called J0439+1634 as it appeared only 850 million years after the Big Bang. That discovery raises fresh questions about black hole formation and activity in the early Universe. The flickering light of this distant cosmic lighthouse…...

1+ mon, 2+ week ago  (436+ words) (This is Part 2 of a series on what would happen if the Sun stopped. Read Part 1 first.) When you crank up your stove to heat a pan to cook your eggs, you have to wait a while. It takes time…...