Somewhere in our galaxy right now, a star is quietly devouring a world that once circled it, shredding rock and metal into a glowing, gravitational whirlpool. That image is not science fiction; astronomers are now catching these stellar crimes almost in the act, and the evidence is written in light and dust. What makes ...
On the icy fringe of our solar system, far beyond Pluto’s lonely path, something massive appears to be tugging at the orbits of distant worlds. For nearly a decade, astronomers have watched strange patterns in the Kuiper Belt and asked a question that sounds like science fiction: Is there a hidden ninth planet, still ...
The star we treat as a familiar backdrop to daily life has quietly become one of the strangest laboratories in modern physics. Over the past few years, spacecraft have plunged into its blistering atmosphere, neutrino detectors have listened for ghostly particles from its core, and radio telescopes have watched it flicker in ways that ...
On the grandest scales, the universe looks less like a random scatter of galaxies and more like a ghostly spiderweb stretching across unimaginable distances. For decades, astronomers suspected there was an underlying pattern, but only in recent years have powerful telescopes and supercomputers begun to reveal its full, intricate geometry. This so‑called cosmic web ...
On warm August nights, the heavens put on a show far grander than any firework display. The Perseid meteor shower, famous for its fast, bright streaks, is about to peak. But in 2025, stargazers face a challenge: a bright waning gibbous Moon rising just as the shower reaches its height. The cosmic puzzle is simple—how ...
We like to think we know the Sun. It rises, it sets, it burns steadily in our skies, a comforting backdrop to everything else that changes. But in observatories from Hawaii to space-based platforms trailing Earth’s orbit, scientists are discovering that our star is far stranger, more dynamic, and more finely tuned than our ...
The universe is supposed to play by rules, yet the more precisely astronomers measure those rules, the stranger the cosmos begins to look. From galaxies that rotate as if gripped by invisible hands to cosmic flashes that outshine entire galaxies for a heartbeat, the sky keeps slipping out of our theoretical grasp. Every major ...
From a distance, Venus and Earth look like cosmic twins: two rocky worlds, similar in size, orbiting the same star in the same neighborhood of space. But up close, the resemblance collapses into something almost nightmarish. One is wrapped in storms, lava, and air hot enough to melt lead; the other is draped in ...
Somewhere beyond the planets we know, past the frozen rubble of Pluto’s realm, something is tugging at our solar system’s edge. Astronomers see its fingerprints in the strange orbits of distant icy worlds, like chairs in a room nudged out of place by an unseen guest. They suspect a new kind of neighbor: a ...
The universe is supposed to run on rules, yet the deeper astronomers look, the stranger those rules seem to become. With every new space telescope or detector we launch, the cosmos offers up another puzzle that bends our expectations, and sometimes our patience. For all our breakthroughs in physics, from black holes to exoplanets, ...
