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Science
Physics, climate, planetary science, and the research that shapes how we understand the universe and our place in it.
Deimos may owe both its enormous south-polar depression and strangely smooth surface to a single 300-metre asteroid impact — a blow whose debris spread around the entire moon and would mean Mars’s smaller satellite is essentially a porous rubble pile
Webb spectra found an ancient massive galaxy packed with far more small, faint stars than expected, implying some of the universe’s earliest giants may be roughly four times heavier than astronomers calculated — deepening the mystery of how they formed so quickly
Webb spectra found an ancient massive galaxy packed with far more small, faint stars than expected, implying some of the universe’s earliest giants may be roughly four times heavier than astronomers calculated — deepening the mystery of how they formed so quickly
A single neutrino caught beneath the Antarctic ice sent astronomers searching across 11 billion light-years — and led them to a young galaxy nicknamed the Shadow Blaster, its light bent and magnified by another galaxy standing between it and Earth
The universe is 13.8 billion years old, yet the observable universe is about 93 billion light-years across. That isn’t because light broke its own speed limit: while the oldest light travelled toward us, the space separating us from its source continued to expand, leaving that source’s present-day location roughly 46.5 billion light-years away.
In March 2025, DESI used nearly 15 million galaxies and quasars to build the largest 3D map of the universe yet. Combined with several other cosmic measurements, it strengthened a deeply unsettling possibility: dark energy—the force accelerating cosmic expansion—may be weakening, contradicting the standard model’s assumption that it never changes.
Engineers sent robotic "sensor fish" through a Columbia River dam, then subjected 5,767 young salmon to the same pressure drop — revealing that turbine blades are rarely what kill them; their swim bladders expand so violently that organs rupture and gas bubbles lodge in their gills
A round-trip Mars mission could last roughly three years, and a model based on bone-density data from 69 astronauts predicted that everyone following the longer mission profile would return with osteopenia, while roughly one-third could be at risk of osteoporosis.
The universe’s first massive fusion stars may have burned out within a few million years. But hypothetical dark stars—made mostly of hydrogen and helium yet powered by annihilating dark matter—would have remained so bloated and cool that radiation could not halt the gas falling onto them, allowing some to grow beyond a million solar masses before collapsing into enormous black-hole seeds.
Earth’s outer core is an ocean of liquid metal whose volume roughly equals that of Mars. Seismic waves from repeated French nuclear tests at Mururoa have now revealed parts of it changing over only a few years: signals arrived up to 0.2 seconds early or late, suggesting that structures hundreds of kilometres wide are moving through the molten core on human timescales.
