Universe
A massive star appears to have exploded twice
The unusual sequence began with a signal from a routine source. On 18 August 2025, the LIGO gravitational wave detectors in the United States and the Virgo…
Universe
In February 2022, a geomagnetic storm so minor it barely rated a mention thickened…
A minor G1 geomagnetic storm in February 2022 warmed Earth's upper atmosphere just enough to drag 40 newly deployed Starlink satellites back into a fiery reentry within days — the largest single-event satellite loss in Starlink history and a wake-up call for an industry whose forecasting models were built for the wrong customers.
Universe
During the 1859 solar storm, telegraph operators disconnected their batteries…
On September 2, 1859, telegraph operators George Wood in Boston and Frederick Royce in Portland unplugged their batteries during the Carrington Event and kept sending messages on the geomagnetic current induced by the storm itself — while elsewhere on the network, sparks jumped from keys and paper tape caught fire.
Space & Missions
When JWST looked at XLSSC 122, a galaxy cluster 10.4 billion light-years away, it…
JWST has caught the galaxy cluster XLSSC 122 bending light from galaxies behind it into long blue-gray arcs, making a dark matter knot visible from a time when the universe was only about 3.3 billion years old.
Science & Engineering
For a decade the Pink Planet was too faint for any ground telescope to study
GJ 504 b, the rosy world that defeated the world's biggest ground telescopes for years, gave up its first spectrum to JWST in a few hours of telescope time. The model that matched the light needed clouds made of salt.
Universe
The June Bootids have flared to dozens of meteors an hour in rare years like 1998…
One of the year's most erratic meteor showers is active now. A handful of times it has stunned observers. Most years it barely registers, and the official 2026 calendar predicts nothing unusual.
Space & Missions
Our galaxy and its neighbours are racing through space at more than two million…
Measured against the cosmic microwave background, the Local Group moves at about 631 km/s. The motion is a tug-of-war: pulled toward the Great Attractor and Shapley Concentration, and pushed from the Dipole Repeller void, identified in 2017. Why a void can 'push', and what is still being mapped.
Space & Missions
In the far future the expansion of space will carry every other galaxy beyond the…
Accelerating expansion will eventually push every galaxy beyond the Local Group past the cosmic horizon, erasing the three pillars of Big Bang evidence. As Krauss and Scherrer argued, future astronomers would reasonably conclude they live in a static, eternal galaxy. What that says about what we may have already lost.
Space & Missions
Deep inside Neptune and Uranus the pressure is thought to crush carbon into…
Deep in the ice giants, methane is thought to break apart and the freed carbon crystallise into diamond that sinks toward the core. In 2017 a team at SLAC recreated the key step in the lab. The evidence, and why it is a strong case rather than a sighting.
Constellations
HD 189733b looks deep blue from space, almost Earth-like at first glance
HD 189733b is a deep cobalt blue, the first exoplanet to have its visible colour measured (Hubble, 2013). But the blue comes from silicate hazes, not oceans, in an atmosphere above 1,000C with winds near 7,000 km/h. Same colour as Earth, opposite cause.
Constellations
A Venusian day is 243 Earth days long — longer than the planet’s entire 225-day…
Venus spins once every 243 Earth days, longer than its 225-day year, and backwards. But sunrise to sunrise takes only about 117 Earth days, because the orbital motion and slow retrograde spin pull against each other. And through its opaque clouds, a sunrise is really a slow, diffuse glow.
Science & Engineering
NASA's Parker Solar Probe flew in and out of the solar corona and found a source of…
When NASA's Parker Solar Probe passed through the solar corona during perihelion encounters at the heliospheric current sheet, its instruments recorded…
Earth & Life
Enceladus, a tiny Saturnian moon only about 500 kilometres wide, is actively…
Cassini found Enceladus venting its hidden salty ocean into space, complete with organics, hydrogen pointing to hydrothermal vents, and phosphorus. Modelling suggests the ocean could be long-lived and warm. But habitable conditions are not the same as life, and the ocean's age is still debated.
Universe
In 2002 astronomers averaged the light of 200,000 galaxies and announced the…
The color was an afterthought to a study of cosmic light. When color scientists spotted a mistake in the software's white point, the universe's average shade slid from turquoise to a milky beige, and the astronomers owned the error in public.
Space & Missions
Mercury was once expected to be far too hot for ice, sitting closest to the Sun
Arecibo radar found bright polar patches on Mercury in 1991; MESSENGER confirmed water ice in 2012 through three converging measurements. The reason ice survives on the hottest planet is geometry: a near-zero axial tilt leaves crater floors in permanent shadow at about minus 170C.
Universe
A dying star might never collapse into a black hole
Two Goethe University physicists have found a solution to Einstein's equations in which a collapsing star spawns an expanding speck of dark energy that halts its own ruin, producing a black hole lookalike with neither a singularity nor an event horizon. The catch: it only works under finely tuned conditions.