Picture this: somewhere off a quiet highway in Mississippi, a monstrous rocket engine rumbles to life, shaking the pine trees for miles around. In a nondescript Pennsylvania town, scientists probe the secrets of icy alien oceans. Not every NASA facility is a famous launch pad in Florida or a massive control room in Houston—some are ...
Deep within the cosmic dust that swirls around distant stars, a profound mystery lies hidden. Scientists have discovered something unsettling: certain isotopes that should exist in abundance throughout our solar system have mysteriously vanished from many planetary samples. These missing atomic fingerprints are rewriting everything we thought we knew about how planets form and evolve ...
Space is a vast enigma, a boundless frontier that has captivated humanity’s imagination for centuries. Despite our technological advancements and scientific understanding, the cosmos continues to hold mysteries that defy explanation. These anomalies, scattered throughout the universe, challenge our understanding and invite us to ponder what lies beyond our current knowledge. Let’s journey through some ...
In the vast expanse of the universe, beyond the familiar borders of our solar system, lie some of the most bizarre and intriguing worlds ever discovered. These exoplanets, or planets orbiting stars outside our solar system, defy our earthly expectations with their peculiar characteristics and extraordinary behaviors. Join us as we journey through the cosmos ...
Among the most energetic events in the universe’s catalog of violent events since the Big Bang, astronomers have found a new extreme in the class of cosmic explosions. Dubbed extreme nuclear transients (ENTs), these rare, ultra-luminous events were seen in the centers of far-off galaxies where supermassive black holes split apart large stars in catastrophic ...
The Sun’s poles have long been a cosmic mystery buried from Earth’s perspective by the simple fact that our planet, along with every other spacecraft, orbits within the equatorial plane. Thanks to the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Solar Orbiter spacecraft, however, mankind has now seen the solar south pole in history. Captured in March 2025, ...
A cosmic leviathan stirs across the great, quiet expanse of the early universe. About 12 billion years old, a supermassive black hole has unleashed a jet of energy so strong it defies understanding illuminated not by starlight but by the fading echo of the Big Bang itself. Three times the width of our Milky Way, ...
Astronomers have discovered a cosmic goldmine in the whirling disk of a young star 330 light-years away, rare isotopes of methanol molecules possibly holding the key to the beginnings of life. The discovery of HD 100453, a star hardly a million years old, provides an unparalleled window into the chemical soup that generates planets and ...
At the core of the galaxy Messier 87 (M87), a cosmic behemoth is challenging preconceptions. Renowned for being the first black hole ever directly photographed, the supermassive black hole M87 has just exposed another amazing secret: it devours matter even faster and spins at a blistering 80% of the maximum speed in the universe. Using ...
The first time NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has observed a big magnetic burst in the sun’s corona, this event could fundamentally alter our understanding of solar storms and their impact on Earth. Against expectations, the spacecraft “touches” the sun’s atmosphere in daring close passes and finds a great surge of energy flinging high-speed plasma towards ...
