Science
How does a planet 95 times the mass of Earth end up light enough to float on water?
The gas giant's vast bulk conceals a secret: spread that enormous mass across enough space, and it becomes lighter than water.
Science
The Parker Solar Probe flies through the sun’s outer atmosphere behind a carbon shield eleven and a half centimetres thick, and the arrangement works so well that while the front face glows at almost fourteen hundred degrees, the instruments sitting a metre behind it stay at roughly the temperature of a comfortable living room
A spacecraft no thicker than a hardcover book keeps its instruments cool enough for humans while the sun tries to incinerate it at 1,400 degrees.
Science
How does a lake the size of Lake Ontario stay liquid under four kilometres of Antarctic ice, sealed away from sunlight and the atmosphere for something like fifteen million years?
Sealed beneath Antarctic ice for millions of years, a hidden ocean-sized lake challenges our understanding of life's limits and Earth's hidden frontiers.
Science
On 1 September 1859 a solar storm hit Earth hard enough that auroras were seen over Cuba, and telegraph operators in Boston disconnected their batteries and kept sending messages for two hours on the current the sky was pushing through the wires.
When Earth's magnetic shield nearly failed, telegraph operators accidentally discovered they could send messages on pure solar wind.
Science
The software that landed men on the Moon was not loaded onto the Apollo Guidance Computer so much as woven into it, with women at a Raytheon plant threading wire through or around thousands of tiny magnetic rings by hand, one pass for a one and one miss for a zero, until the whole program was a physical textile
The Apollo Guidance Computer's most critical code wasn't programmed—it was hand-woven by women threading copper wire through thousands of magnetic rings, one pass at a time.
Venusian Heat
A Soviet probe built in 1972 to land on Venus returned to Earth on 10 May 2025, and the same titanium shell meant to survive the hottest planet may have carried it intact through re-entry
A spacecraft built to withstand Venus's hellish surface may have survived its accidental journey home, raising the tantalizing possibility that humanity's oldest lost probe just returned itself to Earth.
Science
Opportunity was built for a ninety-day mission and a target of six hundred metres, and it ran for fourteen and a half years and forty-five kilometres, until a planet-wide dust storm in 2018 blotted out the sun over Perseverance Valley and its final transmission was a reading of falling power and darkening sky
A robot built to last three months became a monument to human ingenuity and Martian luck—until the storm that no one could engineer away.
Outer Planets
At least six moons in our solar system are thought to hide oceans of liquid water beneath their frozen surfaces — and the list may keep growing as old spacecraft data, improved models and new missions reveal oceans in increasingly unexpected places
The solar system's most promising hunting grounds for extraterrestrial life may not be where we thought to look.
Science
How does a planet spin so slowly that a single day there lasts longer than its entire year, while the clouds above it race all the way around in just four days?
The planet's surface crawls so sluggishly that its day outlasts its year—yet its upper atmosphere whips around four times faster than the surface rotates, a contradiction that has puzzled planetary scientists for decades.
Exo Worlds
Earth had life for roughly three billion years before it produced enough oxygen to be detectable from space, which means NASA’s new planet-hunting telescope could be staring directly at an inhabited world and see nothing
The search for alien life relies on a cosmic red herring: Earth itself remained invisible to the very biosignatures astronomers now use to hunt for habitable worlds.
Exo Worlds
We assumed exomoons would be easy to find once we had the technology — but moons are small, dim, and hidden in the glare of their host, and it took until July 2026 and a radial-velocity wobble on a brown dwarf before astronomers had their first plausible detection
Finding exomoons proved far harder than astronomers expected—until a tiny wobble in a brown dwarf's motion finally revealed one hiding in plain sight.
Outer Planets
Jupiter’s moon Europa hides a saltwater ocean that may contain more than twice the water of all Earth’s oceans combined, yet a new measurement puts 29 kilometres of solid ice above it, a barrier taller than three Mount Everests stacked end to end
The frozen crust of Europa may be thicker than scientists hoped, potentially making any mission to reach the hidden ocean beneath even more challenging than previously thought.
Science
How does an animal weighing less than a chocolate bar fly 13,000 kilometres across the Pacific without landing, eating or sleeping?
The tiny migrants rewire their bodies before each epic journey, pushing the limits of animal endurance in ways that challenge everything we thought possible about survival.
Science
Scientists expected the sun to enter a period of historic quiet after 2008, when solar activity hit its weakest level on record — instead it reversed course entirely and has been growing more active ever since, in a trend NASA published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters in September 2025
A solar minimum that never happened: the Sun's mysterious reversal has left scientists scrambling to understand what comes next.
Science
Two and a half kilometres beneath the Antarctic ice, a cubic kilometre of frozen water has been wired with 5,160 light sensors, turning the South Pole itself into a telescope that looks down through the entire planet to catch particles arriving from the other side of the sky
A neutrino detector buried deep in Antarctic ice is catching ghost particles that pass straight through Earth, revealing violent cosmic events invisible to traditional telescopes.
Science
The second closest potentially habitable planet to Earth is not around a famous star; it is GJ 887 d, confirmed in 2026 around a quiet red dwarf 10.7 light-years away – making GJ 887 d the second-closest known habitable-zone planet after Proxima Centauri b
The most promising nearby world for life doesn't have a name you'd recognize—just a catalog designation and a star so dim it barely registers in our sky.