Planetary science6 min read
Enceladus is still venting its ocean
Fresh analysis of the plume feeding Saturn's E ring finds complex organics and phosphates — the chemistry of habitability, sampled from orbit.
Read discoveryThe record
Discover what’s beyond.
The universe is constantly revealing something new.
Read the record
Cosmology
The galaxies that arrived too early
The first deep fields from Webb kept turning up galaxies that seemed too massive, too ordered, too soon after the Big Bang. New observations are starting to explain why — or change what we think the first hundred million years were like.
Read discoveryLatest discoveries
New findings, observations, and developments.
Space phenomena
Events worth watching for.
The sky keeps a schedule. Some of it is written down.
Solar eclipses
The moon's shadow crossing Earth — a coincidence of size and distance that will not last forever.
Meteor showers
Earth running through the debris trails of comets, twice a year, predictably.
Supernovae
The deaths of massive stars — bright enough to outshine their galaxies, brief enough to miss.
Aurorae
Solar wind meeting magnetic field: curtains of light over the poles, visible further south than usual this decade.
Gravitational waves
Spacetime itself, ringing after a collision of black holes a billion light-years away.
Cosmic collisions
Galaxies passing through one another. Stars almost never touch; the gas always does.
Explainers
Questions, answered carefully.
The ideas behind the headlines, explained without shortcuts.
How do we detect exoplanets?
6 min readMostly by watching a star blink, wobble, or bend — three subtle signatures, three Nobel-worthy techniques.
How does gravitational lensing work?
7 min readMass curves spacetime, spacetime curves light. The universe's largest objects are also its best telescopes.
Why do we see the past when we look into space?
5 min readLight travels fast, but space is vast. Every view of the sky is a view of history — some of it nearly the beginning.
What happens when a star dies?
8 min readIts mass decides everything: a slow fade, a violent explosion, or a collapse that never finishes.
The record is still being written.
Somewhere tonight, something is being observed for the first time. Read along with us.