News
Mercury is shrinking — as its iron core slowly cools, the whole planet has contracted by up to seven kilometres, wrinkling its surface into cliffs hundreds of miles long
17+ hour, 35+ min ago (349+ words) Mercury carries the record of planetary cooling across its surface. Long, curving cliffs cut through craters and plains because the small planet lost internal...
Enceladus, a Saturn moon just 500 kilometres wide, fires geysers of water thousands of kilometres into space through cracks at its south pole — and that water carries the building blocks of life
15+ hour, 36+ min ago (759+ words) Enceladus is only about 500 kilometres across, yet it continuously ejects water vapour and ice from fractures near its south pole. The James Webb Space...
In 2004 a NASA probe caught a comet's tail on a sheet of aerogel, flew the grains 4.6 billion kilometres home, and dropped them into the Utah desert — the first solid pieces of a comet ever returned to Earth
19+ hour, 35+ min ago (841+ words) On 2 January 2004, NASA's Stardust spacecraft flew through the cloud surrounding comet 81P/Wild 2 at 6.1 kilometres per second. A collector filled with silica...
A primitive dwarf galaxy with almost none of the heavy elements found in the Milky Way is somehow producing iron and silicon-carbide dust — materials astronomers thought early galaxies would struggle to make
21+ hour, 36+ min ago (729+ words) The dwarf galaxy Sextans A is poor in the elements astronomers collectively call metals. Yet observations from the James Webb Space Telescope indicate that...
Voyager 1 has no engine running. The 38,000-mile-per-hour speed it has held since its Saturn flyby in 1980 is borrowed momentum from planets it grazed more than four decades ago, and that free ride carries it to one light-day from Earth this November
1+ day, 6+ hour ago (902+ words) Published July 18, 2026 Voyager 1 is often imagined as a spacecraft still pushing itself outward, an engine burning faintly somewhere beyond the planets. That is not how its journey works. The probe is moving because it was launched onto a carefully chosen…...
What filled the universe in its first microseconds wasn’t gas, dust or atoms — it was a trillion-degree soup of quarks and gluons, and the LHC has now seen a single quark leave the wake through it that physicists had predicted for years
1+ day, 7+ hour ago (416+ words) The CMS experiment at CERN has reported the first direct observation of a diffusion wake in quark-gluon plasma using dijet events, the short-lived fluid...
We tend to think reusable rockets are still experimental, but in 2025 SpaceX’s partly reusable Falcon 9 flew 165 missions — one every 2.2 days — and successfully delivered its payload on every flight
1+ day, 9+ hour ago (1057+ words) Published July 18, 2026 The old image of a reusable rocket is still a test article: stainless steel, scorch marks, crowds watching for the landing, engineers waiting to see whether the thing survives. Falcon 9 has moved past that stage. In 2025, SpaceX’s workhorse…...
A planet orbiting twin suns was directly photographed in 2025, hugging its two stars six times closer than any other world ever found in a binary system — a real version of Tatooine that should not, according to current theory, be able to exist there
1+ day, 9+ hour ago (808+ words) Published July 18, 2026 The new world is called HD 143811 AB b, and it belongs to a binary star system roughly 446 light-years from Earth in the Scorpius-Centaurus star-forming region. In December 2025, a Northwestern University-led team reported that astronomers had directly imaged the…...
In 1984, Soviet cosmonaut Oleg Atkov flew a portable ultrasound to Salyut 7 and became the first doctor to image a human heart shrinking in real time in orbit
1+ day, 10+ hour ago (561+ words) In 1984, Soviet cardiologist Oleg Atkov spent 237 days aboard Salyut 7 with a portable echocardiography unit, producing what appear to be the first real-time ultrasound images of a human heart remodeling in microgravity — and founding a tradition of orbital imaging that still…...
Apollo 13 set the record for the farthest humans had travelled from Earth by accident in 1970, after an explosion forced it into an emergency loop around the Moon. Artemis II broke it by design in April 2026, flying exactly 4,101 miles farther — then proposing names for two lunar craters as the crew passed overhead
1+ day, 12+ hour ago (646+ words) The Apollo 13 distance record was never meant to be a monument. It was a byproduct of a rescue....