
The bright nitrogen ice plain forming the left lobe of Pluto's heart has not a…
Pluto's heart is erasing its own history, its nitrogen plains so geologically restless that they shed impact scars faster than they accumulate them.
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.

Pluto's heart is erasing its own history, its nitrogen plains so geologically restless that they shed impact scars faster than they accumulate them.
Jul 31, 2026

The solar system's most boring-looking planet conceals a nauseating secret beneath its serene exterior.
Jul 30, 2026

The galaxy harbors trillions of orphaned worlds, cast out from their birth systems and now drifting alone through the void.
Jul 24, 2026

A decade-long hunt for the solar system's missing tenth planet begins with the most powerful digital eye ever aimed at the sky.
Jul 24, 2026

The Perseverance rover has found carbon molecules in Martian rocks that mirror the chemistry underlying all known life—raising urgent questions about what conditions created them.
Jul 24, 2026

A spacecraft running on 1970s computer chips still transmits data from the edge of interstellar space—a feat of engineering that raises an uncomfortable question about what we've sacrificed for speed.
Jul 24, 2026

In the solar system's deep freeze, heat from within may unlock worlds we thought impossible to inhabit.
Jul 23, 2026

But the mountain is also sacred to Native Hawaiians, and decades of construction have ignited a battle over who gets to use Earth's most precious viewing platform.
Jul 23, 2026

A hidden world betrayed itself through the infrared haze—revealing how Webb sees through cosmic dust that defeated astronomers for over a decade.
Jul 23, 2026

The planet's backwards rotation and glacial spin create a cosmic paradox: sunrise comes in the west, and the Sun takes longer to cross the sky than Venus takes to orbit the Sun.
Jul 23, 2026

Neptune radiates more heat than it receives from the Sun, yet somehow generates winds twice as fast as Earth's most violent hurricanes.
Jul 23, 2026

A tantalizing theory built on lightning observations and physics calculations—not proof of a gem-filled world orbiting the sun.
Jul 23, 2026

A faint spectral signature hinting at gases tied to Earth's ocean life has scientists arguing whether we're seeing biosignatures or just chemistry.
Jul 23, 2026

Astronomers have long puzzled over where the universe's gold originates—now evidence points to the catastrophic collision of two neutron stars, an explosion so luminous it drowns out hundreds of millions of suns.
Jul 22, 2026

Titan has rivers, rain and seas—but none of them contain a drop of water, because on Saturn's moon, methane flows where water freezes solid.
Jul 22, 2026

A sliver of apparently barren sky revealed thousands of galaxies, fundamentally reshaping how we understand the universe's scale.
Jul 22, 2026