Universe
We assume life needs a sun, but a team at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich…
The conditions for life may not require starlight at all—just the right moon orbiting the right rogue planet.
Universe
In 1970, Venera 7 appeared to fall silent when it hit Venus, but engineers later…
What ground control dismissed as static turned out to be humanity's first whisper from another world.
Universe
Mercury is shrinking — as its iron core slowly cools, the whole planet has…
A dying world's cooling core is literally pulling its skin tight, creating dramatic geological scars that reveal how planets age.
Universe
A primitive dwarf galaxy with almost none of the heavy elements found in the Milky…
The cosmos's dustiest rebels: ancient stars in a metal-poor galaxy are forging heavy elements astronomers thought impossible without cosmic maturity.
Space & Missions
Voyager 1 has no engine running. The 38,000-mile-per-hour speed it has held since…
Voyager 1 is often imagined as a spacecraft still pushing itself outward, an engine burning faintly somewhere beyond the planets.
Space & Missions
A planet orbiting twin suns was directly photographed in 2025, hugging its two…
A planet can orbit two stars without being strange in fiction. The strange part is finding one in a real telescope image, tucked far closer to its twin suns than astronomers thought such a directly photographed world ought to be.
Universe
In 1984, Soviet cosmonaut Oleg Atkov flew a portable ultrasound to Salyut 7 and…
In 1984, Soviet cardiologist Oleg Atkov spent 237 days aboard Salyut 7 with a portable echocardiography unit, producing what appear to be the first real-time ultrasound images of a human heart remodeling in microgravity — and founding a tradition of orbital imaging that still guides ISS medicine today.
Universe
NASA has calculated, to the precise second, when Voyager 1 will be exactly one…
NASA has reduced one of the strangest milestones in human engineering to a timestamp.
Universe
We tend to think of comets as ancient relics of our own solar system, but…
Most comets are treated as leftovers from a local story. They formed with the planets, spent billions of years in the cold outskirts of the Solar System, and occasionally fall inward, warming just enough for sunlight to pull gas and dust from their surfaces.
Universe
We tend to think dark energy has always pushed the universe outward at the same…
The simplest picture treats dark energy as a constant. DESI's 2025 galaxy survey, combined with other data, hints instead that it was stronger in the past and has been weakening, though the signal is not yet at the level physicists call a discovery.
Universe
In March 2025, four rookie astronauts on SpaceX's Fram2 polar mission carried a…
On March 31, 2025, four first-time astronauts flying the first human mission ever to loop directly over Earth's poles carried a commercial off-the-shelf X-ray…
Universe
Titan is the only place beyond Earth where a spacecraft has landed on a surface…
On 14 January 2005, a small European probe dropped through an orange atmosphere, broke through the haze and settled onto a world nearly 1.5 billion kilometres from the Sun.
Universe
Saturn has a six-sided storm system wider than Earth, and scientists still cannot…
At Saturn's north pole, clouds race around a shape that looks as if it was drawn with a ruler.
Universe
The engineers trying to save a fading Voyager had one chance to fire thrusters…
The story sounds almost too neat: a spacecraft launched in 1977, a set of thrusters last used in 1980, and a team on Earth asking them to work again 37 years later.
Universe
The closest star beyond the Sun is only four light-years away, yet at the speed of…
Four light-years sounds close only because astronomy usually deals in much larger numbers.
Universe
Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun, yet permanently shadowed craters near its…
Mercury is a planet of extremes. At the equator during the day, its surface can become hot enough to melt lead.