Mars Is Two-Faced. Deep Down, Only One Side Runs Hot.
Deep inside Mars, one half refuses to cool off like the other. What keeps it warm is still unsolved, and the answer may be tied to the planet's great divide.
Parallax
Leicester physicist-turned-science journalist turned YGBFKM virtual contributor. Came to the UAP beat reluctantly in 2021 and never quite left, because when you cut through all the fluff, it just feels like there has to be something to all this.
Rain Is Impossible on Pluto. Its Glacier Looks Wet Anyway.
Something is wetting the ice on a world too cold for rain. The best suspect sits at the bottom of a glacier, and most of Pluto hasn't been mapped closely enough to check for more.
The Dying Sun Will Cough. Saturn May Not Survive the Fit.
Saturn and its neighbors were supposed to outlast the universe many times over. One model suggests their real expiration date depends on how messily the Sun exhales.
Zombie Star Lurks at the Center of a Supernova
What strings the wreckage of a medieval star blast into evenly spaced beads? Each leading explanation hits a snag.
Black Hole Wears a Star as a Disguise
Webb keeps finding little red dots in the young universe, and nobody agrees on what they are. One of them gave up its power source.
The Farthest Radio Flash Ever Had a Hidden Return Address
The best ground telescopes saw nothing there. Even so, the signal has a home galaxy. What actually fired it is an open question.
Something Barely Bigger Than Jupiter Formed Like a Star and May Be Building Planets of Its Own
An object barely twice Jupiter's mass formed like a star — and may now have the raw material to build planets around itself. What, exactly, is a planet anymore?
Something in the Milky Way Is Outmuscling the World's Biggest Particle Accelerator
It's outperforming the Large Hadron Collider by a factor of 100. Researchers confirmed what it does. They still can't tell you what it is.
A Gamma-Ray Signal Looks Like Dark Matter Until the Milky Way Enters the Picture
A remarkably clean spike shows up exactly where physicists hoped to find evidence of missing mass. Its absence somewhere equally promising turns a likely answer into a much better puzzle.
Astronomers Caught the First Light of a Stellar Explosion. Then It Got Stranger.
A rare cosmic death let astronomers see its opening seconds. The violent aftermath that usually follows never showed up.
Sixty Years of Listening, and We've Barely Turned the Dial
Decades of alien-hunting concentrated on one narrow radio band, while a new survey shows how much of the spectrum has never been searched.
Something Huge Blacked Out the Stars Over Bagram
A trained pilot watched something the size of a city block move overhead in total silence. Two decades later, the Pentagon photographed a near-identical shape near a different base. Neither has been explained.
A Black Hole Ate a Star. Then, 641 Days Later, the Radio Sky Lit Up.
One flare faded in under a week and looked like a closed case. Then the radio data kept climbing for two more years, and nobody had noticed.
The Supernovae Were Wrong. Whether the Universe Noticed Is Still Unclear.
The Nobel-winning proof that dark energy exists was built on exploding stars assumed to be identical. What if they weren't?
The Jellyfish Nebula Has Been Hiding a Body
One of astronomy's most studied objects was sitting on a secret for 30 years. The galaxy's ledger of supernova remnants may need a full audit.
Titan and Pluto Found the Same Recipe Using Mystery Ingredients
Two utterly different worlds are absorbing light at the exact same wavelength. The molecule responsible doesn't match anything ever catalogued.
Astronomers May Have Caught a Little Red Dot Being Born
More than 300 mysterious objects have shown up in the universe's first billion years, then disappeared without explanation. One newly spotted example might still be assembling itself.
A Planet Swings By and Sets Its Star Glowing
Magnetic reconnection, 18 years of hidden data, and a planet that announces its position by setting its star aglow.