On Friday 13 April 2029, something will happen that has not happened in recorded human history. A rock roughly 375 metres across, wide enough to swallow several city blocks and heavy enough to reshape a coastline if it ever hit, will slide past Earth at a distance of just 32,000 kilometres. Closer than the satellites … Read more
Before the first star had ignited, before any galaxy had taken shape, the universe was full of gas: cold, pristine, mostly hydrogen, floating in the dark. In certain pockets of that gas, something was happening at a scale almost too small to calculate. Particles of dark matter, drifting invisibly through the fog, were quietly decaying. … Read more
The stars don’t lie. That’s the operating assumption behind decades of work by Monica Valluri, a research professor at the University of Michigan who has spent her career writing code to do something that sounds deceptively simple: watch how stars move near the center of a galaxy and infer, from the precise curvature of their … Read more
The robot’s arm descends toward a pale, flat rock. Twelve centimeters. Eight. Five. A foam ring makes contact, a time-of-flight sensor confirms the distance, and a UV light flickers on inside the instrument housing as the microscope locks focus. The image appears on a screen across the room: gypsum, its crystalline texture mapped at millimeter … Read more
NGC 1365 hangs in the Fornax Cluster roughly 60 million light-years away, a great barred spiral with two curving arms and a bright, turbulent core: just the sort of galaxy you’d flip past in an atlas without stopping. It is not the largest galaxy known, nor the most exotic, nor particularly unusual in its basic … Read more
Ten minutes. That’s all the warning Mars Express had before the X-rays arrived. On the morning of 15 May 2024, while half of Earth was still sharing aurora photographs on social media, the same solar storm that had lit up skies from London to Mexico was barrelling towards the Red Planet at the speed of … Read more
A vast new radio telescope mosaic of the galaxy’s turbulent core is forcing astronomers to rethink where and why stars form — and has already thrown up one object nobody can explain. Cold gas streams through the heart of the Milky Way in ribbons and filaments, feeding on itself, crashing into dense clumps, occasionally igniting … Read more
Astronomers thought they’d found an exoplanet. For years, a bright dot called Fomalhaut b orbited a nearby star, reflecting starlight through clouds of dust. Then it disappeared. When Hubble looked again in 2023, a different bright spot had materialized elsewhere in the same debris belt, 23.4 astronomical units away from where the first one had … Read more
That underground lake on Mars? Probably just rock and dust. A new analysis from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, published in Geophysical Research Letters, suggests the bright radar signal beneath Mars’ south pole—the one that looked so much like a subglacial lake—is more likely coming from buried rock than liquid water. The study also demonstrates how … Read more
A supermassive black hole spotted just 570 million years after the Big Bang is growing faster than its host galaxy can keep up, defying astronomers’ expectations about how the early universe assembled itself. The discovery, made using the James Webb Space Telescope, reveals a cosmic heavyweight that weighs in at 100 million times the mass … Read more