A photo shows the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment Fast Radio Burst Project at night. One of the universe’s deep mysteries just got a lot stranger. Astrophysicists have discovered a clue that could help explain why, every once in a…
An instrument on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this image of actinoform clouds form near Australia on Jan.29.. A person lounging on a patch of grass dreaming up images in the clouds will typically have only the familiar puffs and streaks…
A single frame Rosetta navigation camera image of Comet 67P The Rosetta spacecraft’s rubber ducky comet has slowly changed color as it moved through space, from red to blueish and then red again. According to a new paper published Feb.…
The left lobe of Pluto’s heart-shaped feature is a 600-mile-wide (1,000 kilometers) ice plain known as Sputnik Planitia. Pluto’s icy heart is beating. The dwarf planet’s famous heart-shaped feature, which NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft discovered during its epic July 2015…
Image of a dusty star-forming galaxy. Before our universe reached its 1 billionth birthday, an unusual galaxy formed and began whipping up new stars at astounding speeds. Then, a mere 800 million years later, the ultramassive galaxy suddenly fell silent,…
An illustration shows what the interior of IceCube might look like without the ice. Where do neutrinos get their mass from? It’s a mystery, one of the most baffling in the Standard Model of particle physics. But a team of…
A binary pair of red dwarf stars might be warping space-time and distorting our view of another star much, much farther away. In summer 2016, astronomers watched a star 2,500 light-years away in the Cygnus constellation flash to life as…
Gravitational waves, or ripples in space-time, slip through Earth all the time, carrying secrets about the universe. But until a few years ago, we couldn’t detect these waves at all, and even now, we have only the most basic ability…
After decades of poking around in the math behind the glue holding the innards of all matter together, physicists have found a strange hypothetical particle, one that has never appeared in any experiment. Called a sexaquark, the oddball is made…
An illustration showing the newly discovered dwarf nova system, a finding detailed in the October 2019 issue of the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. A “vampire” dwarf star is sucking the life force from its partner star,…
A scene from Walmart’s new “space-y” Super Bowl commercial. This year’s Super Bowl commercials promise to be out of this world. This upcoming Sunday (Feb. 2), a number of cosmic commercials are scheduled to run during the 2020 Super Bowl.…
Artist’s illustration of Lense-Thirring frame-dragging resulting from a rotating white dwarf in the PSR J1141-6545 binary star system. The way the fabric of space and time swirls in a cosmic whirlpool around a dead star has confirmed yet another prediction…