A Space Daily column

Deep Field

Astronomy and cosmology

Deep Field covers astronomy and cosmology. Telescopes and what they find, planets near and far, and the strange physics of the deep universe, traced back to the journal papers and observatory data behind the headlines.

Science

In 1920, a farmer ploughing near Grootfontein in Namibia struck a buried slab of iron weighing roughly 60 tonnes. It proved to be Hoba, the largest intact meteorite ever found, and it has never been moved from where it landed—probably less than 80,000 years ago. No crater survives around it; its broad, flat shape may have slowed its descent until it struck more like a colossal dropped anvil than a cosmic projectile.

Hoba’s 60-tonne iron mass, missing crater and disputed discovery story constrain a rare atmospheric descent that no surviving witness saw.

Sep 11, 2026

Science

On the night of May 18–19, 1910, Earth passed through the tail of Halley’s Comet, three months after astronomers detected the poisonous gas cyanogen within it. Sensational reports helped entrepreneurs sell anti-comet pills, mouth inhalers and even comet insurance—but the tail was so extraordinarily diffuse that no harmful effect was detected.

Halley’s poisonous cyanogen was detectable but harmlessly dilute, while the 1910 tail crossing created a market for pills, leather inhalers and impossible insurance.

Sep 11, 2026

Jovian Dreams

On September 21, 2003, controllers drove Galileo into Jupiter at nearly 108,000 miles per hour. The spacecraft had found evidence of a saltwater ocean beneath Europa’s ice, and with its propellant running low, NASA could not guarantee that the unsterilized orbiter would never crash into the potentially habitable moon carrying microbes from Earth.

Galileo’s final plunge was a planetary-protection decision: NASA used the orbiter’s remaining control to keep an unsterilised spacecraft away from Europa.

Sep 10, 2026

Physics News

Standard stellar-evolution models predict few black holes born directly between about 60 and 130 solar masses, yet GW231123 appeared to involve objects of roughly 137 and 103 solar masses. A new analysis argues that gravitational lensing magnified and distorted the signal, making the merger appear closer—and therefore intrinsically heavier—than it was. Under this still-unconfirmed interpretation, its combined mass falls from 190–265 to 100–180 Suns, making the system far less extreme.

A peer-reviewed lensing analysis could reduce GW231123’s inferred total mass from 190–265 to 100–180 solar masses. The signal is a compelling candidate, but gravitational-wave lensing remains unconfirmed.

Sep 10, 2026

Marsdaily

Olympus Mons grew so massive that parts of its lower flanks catastrophically collapsed, sending broken rock sliding hundreds of kilometres across the Martian plains—possibly lubricated when hot lava melted buried ice.

Orbital evidence links Olympus Mons's aureole to immense flank failures. Water or ice may explain the long runout, but lava-driven melting remains one proposed mechanism.

Sep 10, 2026

Science

Four fixed half-pipe reflectors in British Columbia, each 100 meters long and strung with 1,024 antennas, watched the same overhead strip of sky from July 25, 2018 to September 15, 2023 and logged 4,539 fast radio bursts from 3,641 separate sources, on a telescope that cannot be aimed.

Astronomers have caught thousands of mysterious cosmic explosions in the act, revealing patterns that hint at what might be triggering them from across the universe.

Sep 9, 2026

Sky Nightly

Four amateur astronomers using a telescope in Chile’s Atacama desert found a comet on 13 January 2026, 81 days before it would graze past the Sun. Nobody alive had seen its previous pass, because the orbit it travels on brings it back only about every 1,900 years.

A glimpse of a celestial wanderer that last visited during the Middle Ages—caught not by professional observatories, but by four amateurs with a telescope and patience.

Sep 9, 2026

Constellations

About 70 young stars sit inside one dark knot of gas in the Carina Nebula: ESA’s Webb Picture of the Month for August 2026 shows the Treasure Chest globule, 7,500 light years off, lit by a 19-solar-mass O-type star

A stellar nursery the size of a city block holds a monster star waiting to reshape everything around it.

Sep 9, 2026

Cosmology

Since 1908 an observatory outside Paris has photographed the Sun on almost every clear day, pausing only for the First World War. The collection contains more than 120,000 images, and one staff member led a twenty-year effort to digitize its plates and film into a public archive.

A century of daily photographs reveals how the Sun has transformed—if you're patient enough to notice.

Sep 9, 2026

Physics News

In 2026, physicists allowed an Alcubierre-shaped warp field to evolve instead of holding its bubble profile artificially fixed, and found that it became unstable: nearby trajectories crossed to form caustics, making the velocity field multivalued unless some still-unknown physics could stabilize it.

An evolving theoretical warp field developed crossing trajectories under an inertial-motion assumption, exposing the difference between prescribing a bubble and physically stabilising one.

Sep 9, 2026

Physics News

Rice University physicists used a grain-of-sand-sized magnet levitated above a superconductor cooled to near absolute zero to search for ultraheavy dark matter. Results presented in September 2026 found no signal but probed particles approximately 10 million times heavier than those examined in previous levitated-particle experiments.

A magnetically levitated sensor extended the ultraheavy dark-matter search by seven orders of magnitude in mass reach, setting limits without a confirmed detection.

Sep 9, 2026

Climate Science

The world’s oceans have hit record temperatures, the Associated Press reports, with long-run climate warming and an El Niño arriving together so the background trend and the cyclical spike are stacked on the same water

When a climate cycle and a warming trend collide, oceans pay the price—and scientists worry about what comes next.

Sep 8, 2026

Physics News

On November 12, 2001, with Japan’s Super-Kamiokande tank about 80 percent full, a photomultiplier tube near the bottom—beneath roughly 30 metres of water—apparently imploded. The shock wave triggered a two-second chain reaction that destroyed 6,777 of the detector’s 11,146 glass eyes, leaving its floor buried beneath shattered glass and twisted equipment.

A collapsing light sensor set off a cascade through Japan’s neutrino detector in 2001. Reconstruction introduced protective covers to keep a future implosion from spreading.

Sep 8, 2026

Earth Observation

FOX Weather is broadcasting from a flat, calm Kauaʻi as Hurricane Lowell approaches, the still conditions on camera marking the gap between a storm’s arrival on the radar and its arrival on the beach

The deceptive calm before a hurricane hits reveals how radar and reality exist in different time zones.

Sep 8, 2026

Asia News

A survivor pulled from Nepal’s flood debris after 10 days told rescuers he believes others are still alive, FOX 9 reports — a claim that pushes the operation back from recovery to rescue

One survivor's conviction that others endure in the tunnel has transformed the operation from grim certainty into desperate possibility, reshaping every decision rescuers must make in the next critical hours.

Sep 8, 2026

Weather Report

Hurricane Marie is spinning far out in the Pacific while its swell is already breaking on Southern California beaches, KTLA 5 reports, with the surf arriving days ahead of a storm that never comes ashore

The Pacific's most powerful storms can reshape coastlines from hundreds of miles away, delivering dangerous surf long before—or even if—the hurricane itself never arrives.

Sep 8, 2026