Amazing View of How Dust Storms Grow on Mars
In 2018, Mars experienced one of its global dust storms, a phenomenon seen nowhere else. As science would have it,…
New Hubble Photos of Planetary Nebulae
Planetary nebulae are astronomy's gateway drug. Their eye-catching forms make us wonder what process created them, and what else is…
Astronomers Just Detected Either the Least Massive Black Hole, or a Strange and Massive Neutron Star
Somewhere around 2.5 solar masses is the line between black holes and neutron stars. Now we've found an object right…
Pluto and Other Kuiper Belt Objects Started Out With Water Oceans, and Have Been Slowly Freezing Solid for Billions of Years
It seems unlikely that an ocean could persist on a world that never gets closer than 30 astronomical units from…
Another Starship Test Ends in an Explosion (Intentionally This Time)
At their Boca Chica test facility, SpaceX tested another Starship prototype (SN7) to the point of failure, which resulted in…
There’s no evidence that dark matter interacts with any other force but gravity
Most of the universe is made of one of two kinds of mysterious substances, called dark matter and dark energy.…
Planets Form in Just a Few Hundred Thousand Years
Astronomers like to observe young planets forming in circumstellar debris disks, the rotating rings of material around young stars. But…
A Repeating Fast Radio Burst Has Been Found. It Flares for 4 Days and then Remains Silent for 12 Days
Five hundred million light-years from Earth, there is a deeply unusual object. It is radio silent for 12 days, then…
Comet U6 Lemmon Brightens in July
Comet U6 Lemmon promises to be a fine binocular object at dusk.
If You Could See in X-rays, This is What the Universe Would Look Like
X-ray astronomy helps scientists study neutron stars, binary star systems, and supernova remnants, and even helps detect black holes. But…