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Science
Physics, climate, planetary science, and the research that shapes how we understand the universe and our place in it.
93 percent of the Moon’s width slides into Earth’s dark inner shadow on the night of August 27, and because the rim left outside it may stay hundreds of times brighter, the Moon will look bitten rather than red
The only spacecraft ever to directly sample Jupiter’s atmosphere was a single probe dropped into the planet in 1995. It transmitted for just 58 minutes before being destroyed — meaning our only in-situ measurements of Jupiter’s clouds come from one brief descent through one unusually dry patch of an atmosphere larger than Earth itself.
Omega Centauri should contain thousands of stellar-mass black holes, yet astronomers had never identified a single one. In 2026, a University of Utah-led team finally found one by tracking a star through part of a roughly 94-year orbit around an invisible object 4.5 times the Sun’s mass — the first stellar-mass black hole directly detected in the cluster.
For roughly 60 million years, Earth appears to have operated a hidden climate thermostat: when seas rose, shallow sediments trapped more phosphate, starving ocean life and reducing carbon burial, allowing atmospheric CO₂ to rise and warm the planet — while falling seas released the brake, boosting marine productivity and pulling more carbon back out of the atmosphere.
In 1976, Carl Sagan and astrophysicist Edwin Salpeter published a peer-reviewed paper proposing that Jupiter's atmosphere might support an entire aerial ecosystem — sinking microorganisms, buoyant “floaters” potentially kilometres across, and mobile “hunters” that preyed on them — living their entire lives in a world with no solid surface below.
In 2024, a piece of a 5,800-pound battery pallet jettisoned from the International Space Station survived re-entry and punched through a Florida family’s roof and two floors — exposing an awkward feature of space law: the treaties governing falling space objects hold launching nations responsible, rather than giving victims a direct international claim against the private companies involved.
Coffee does not dehydrate you the way everyone says — when 50 habitual drinkers spent three days on four mugs a day and three days on water, their total body water came out the same
The faint smudge of Andromeda you can see with your naked eye on a dark night is 2.5-million-year-old light — photons that left another galaxy around the time the earliest members of our genus were walking Earth.
Marie Curie and her husband Pierre spent nearly four years boiling down seven tonnes of pitchblende in a leaky Paris shed with no ventilation to isolate one-tenth of a gram of radium chloride, and the notebooks she kept during those years are still so radioactive they are stored in lead-lined boxes at the Bibliothèque nationale
Astronomers reported a new kind of cosmic object in Nature on 12 August 2026: a “black hole star” roughly the scale of a solar system, whose star-like envelope is powered not by nuclear fusion but by a feeding black hole. The discovery may finally explain the hundreds of mysterious Little Red Dots JWST has been finding throughout the early universe.
