Science
Dwarf Planet Quaoar has a Ring
Quaoar is one of about 3,000 dwarf planets in our Solar System's Kuiper Belt. Astronomers discovered it in 2002. It's…
Hungry Black Hole was Already Feasting 800 Million Years After the Big Bang
Black holes swallow everything—including light—which explains why we can't see them. But we can observe their immediate surroundings and learn…
How Can We Know if We’re Looking at Habitable exo-Earths or Hellish exo-Venuses?
The differences between Earth and Venus are obvious to us. One is radiant with life and adorned with glittering seas,…
Webb NIRISS Instrument has Gone Offline
The JWST is having a problem. One of its instruments, the Near Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (NIRISS,) has gone…
Scientists Build a Teeny Tiny Tractor Beam
Tractor beams make intuitive sense. Matter and energy interact with each other in countless ways throughout the Universe. Magnetism and…
One Day There Could be a Pipeline of Oxygen Flowing From the Moon’s South Pole
The Artemis program intends to put humans on the Moon for the first time since NASA's Apollo missions. But Artemis…
Game of Probes: The First Probe Sent to Another Civilization Won’t Be the First to Arrive
If we ever detect an Extraterrestrial Civilization (ETC) and start communicating with them, the messages could take years, decades, or…
This Star is Blasting Out a Concentrated Jet of Material at 500 km/s
MWC 349A is a star about 3,900 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus. It's huge, about 38 times as massive…
This Hellish Planet Orbits its Star Every 18 Hours. How Did it Get There?
Astronomers discovered 55 Cancri e in 2004. That was five years before NASA's Kepler planet-hunting spacecraft was launched, and exoplanet…
A Star was Blocking a Galaxy, but Now it’s Moved Enough That Astronomers can Finally Examine What it Was Hiding
One of the biggest puzzles in astronomy, and one of the hardest ones to solve, concerns the formation and evolution…