Betelgeuse Is Haunted by a Hotspot That Should Be Long Gone
The surface of a dying giant should never look the same twice. Two images taken years apart show one bright patch that never got reshuffled. What is holding it there?
Astronomy
The Sun Is the Prime Suspect in a Missing Planet Case
Three long-standing mysteries about our sun. One proposed explanation that's either brilliant or deeply unsettling. What exactly is buried down there?
Earth Microbes Auditioned for Saturn's Ocean Moon. They Got the Part.
The microbes weren't supposed to make it. Researchers called it a long shot. Then they adapted, grew and started producing the exact gas Cassini already found venting into space.
A Dead Star Is Leaving a Wake
Something has been pushing a wave through space for at least 1,000 years. Its obvious power source is missing, and the backup can only explain a few centuries of it.
A Planet Twice Earth's Size Is Orbiting Its Star Backward
Planets are supposed to inherit their star's direction of rotation. Astronomers looked for something that could have knocked this one backward. They couldn't find it.
This Baby Planet Is Already as Massive as Jupiter. It's Not Even a Million Years Old.
Theory gives a giant planet about 5 million years to grow, and longer the farther out it sits. This one sits very far out, and it didn't wait.
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?
84 Objects Are Hiding in Nearby Galaxies. They Vanish When You Look Too Hard.
Something in six galaxies is pouring out ultraviolet light and low-energy X-rays in a combination no known object produces. Nobody knows what it is yet.
Asteroid Stitched Together Like a Cosmic Frankenstein
A century of observations, and we were off by two. What else out there is three things pretending to be one?
At 2 Million Atmospheres, Water Stacks Itself Into Hexagonal Ice
Immense pressures exist deep inside Uranus and Neptune, where scientists have been trying to explain two very strange magnetic fields since Voyager 2 flew past.
A Photon Survived a 2-Billion-Light-Year Cosmic Gauntlet
A photon from the most powerful explosion since the Big Bang survived a journey physics says should have killed it. One hour late. Exactly on schedule for something that shouldn't exist.
Life-Ready Shapes Are Folding Inside Venus's Acid Clouds
The building blocks of life just survived weeks in near-pure sulfuric acid, and folded into functional shapes. Venus's clouds may have been hiding something.
Saturn's North Pole Has a Hexagon. The South Pole One-Upped It.
A giant new atmospheric shape has appeared around Saturn's south pole, big enough to swallow eight Earths. Scientists can't say when it formed, only that it wasn't there before.
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.
One Galaxy Has Three Supermassive Black Holes, Two of Them on a Collision Course
One galaxy is host to three actively feeding black holes. Two are locked in a slow-motion merger, and the third's origin remains an open question the universe won't answer yet.
Mars' Childhood Didn't Go According to Plan
A four-billion-year-old rock sat in the Sahara until 2022, then rewrote the early history of a neighboring planet. How does a world with no tectonic plates end up growing granite?