3+ hour, 3+ min ago   (1603+ words) For about two minutes on the afternoon of Wednesday, August 12, the Moon’s shadow will sweep across the Denmark Strait between Greenland and Iceland, briefly plunging the Sun into darkness. Moments later, the Moon itself will vanish. A total solar eclipse…...

3+ day, 11+ hour ago   (881+ words) Astronomers have detected helium leaking into space from LHS 1140b. This rocky planet is larger than Earth and circles a small, cool star about 49 light-years away. The escaping gas is the signature of the first atmosphere detected on a rocky planet…...

2+ week, 5+ day ago   (680+ words) Today’s Image of the Day from the European Space Agency reveals one of the closest giant galaxies to Earth in remarkable new detail. Captured by the James Webb Space Telescope, the image peers through thick clouds of dust to expose…...

3+ week, 5+ day ago   (687+ words) Some planets are so strange that they force scientists to rethink what they know about the universe. Two newly confirmed worlds do exactly that. Both of these worlds are almost the size of Jupiter, but they are so light and…...

3+ week, 6+ day ago   (843+ words) The sun throws clouds of hot, magnetized gas into space on a regular basis. For years, scientists figured these clouds swell in a steady, predictable way as they drift outward toward Earth. One cloud refused to behave. As it swept…...

3+ week, 6+ day ago   (687+ words) Today’s Image of the Day from the European Space Agency (ESA) captures one of Earth’s most striking natural light shows from a perspective few people will ever experience. Looking down from the International Space Station (ISS), an intense green aurora…...

1+ mon, 12+ hour ago   (937+ words) A rover on Mars can drill into ancient rock, heat a pinch of it, and read the carbon-based molecules that boil off. Several have done exactly that. None has been able to prove that anything alive made those molecules, because…...

1+ mon, 2+ week ago   (877+ words) Scientists have long used chemistry to sort space rocks by origin. Rocks low in the compound behind ordinary sand and quartz always traced back to small, unremarkable asteroids. A meteorite found in the Sahara Desert in 2019 has exactly that chemistry....

1+ mon, 3+ week ago   (854+ words) China is preparing to collect a sample from a small near-Earth asteroid that many scientists suspect is a fragment of the Moon. The leading theory traces the object back to a crater on the lunar far side, where an ancient…...

1+ mon, 4+ week ago   (633+ words) Today’s Image of the Day from the European Space Agency shows two volcanoes that have shaped human history for thousands of years. One still rumbles regularly. The other has become a permanent warning sign of what volcanoes can do when…...