Fireball Over Boston Detonates With the Force of 300 Tons of TNT. Casual Saturday.
A 5.6-metric-ton iron meteor exploded over Boston creating a sonic boom. NASA has a technical name for where it landed.
Astronomy
The Universe's Most Baffling Odd Couples Just Got a Bit More Real
Two Jupiter-sized planets orbit each other in the dark: no star, no system, no explanation. How does something form that shouldn't be able to exist?
Europa's Famous Water Plumes May Have Been a Trick of the Light
A reanalysis of 14 years of Hubble data has quietly dismantled one of the most exciting clues in the search for life near Jupiter.
The Bar at the Beginning of the Universe
Stellar bars don't survive in gas-rich environments. GN20 is 75 percent gas. It has one anyway.
The Sun's Interior and Its Surface Are No Longer Telling the Same Story
Scientists have listened to acoustic waves inside the Sun since 1987. What they're hearing in the current cycle diverges significantly from what four centuries of surface observation would predict.
Life Found a Way to Not Need a Star
The most hospitable worlds in the galaxy might not orbit anything at all. Moons of rogue planets have been drifting through interstellar space for billions of years carrying the chemistry of life.
This Galaxy Has No Spin
A massive early galaxy stopped forming stars and lost its spin before the universe was 2 billion years old. How does a galaxy grow old so fast?
Hot Jupiter Posts Eviction Notice. Mini Neptune Ignores It.
Two planets sharing a solar system they shouldn't both occupy. JWST gave astronomers insight into the atmosphere that explains how they pulled it off.
The Largest Wave in the Solar System Works Like Your Kitchen Sink
A 6,000-km wall of acid clouds sweeps around Venus every few days. Scientists finally know why, and the answer has been sitting in your kitchen the whole time.
Triton Massacred Neptune's Moons. The Outlier Survived.
Nereid was filed under "captured outsider" for decades. JWST says it's the only original moon that survived Triton's arrival. The orbit we called wrong is why it's still there.
Rocky, Gaseous, Gaseous, Rocky. The Universe Skipped Astronomy 101.
A star 116 light-years away built its planets in an order that shouldn't exist. What happened out there at the edge?
The End of the Universe
Astronomers say we've been misreading dark energy; the cosmological constant is negative. Not good news for the universe.
Fight Clubs of the Cosmos
Too massive to originate from a single collapsing star, the biggest black holes form from a series of clashes of smaller black holes.
Glowing Galaxy So Primitive, It's Still Big Bang Gas
LAP1-B glows with radiation no known star produces. Powerful evidence points to first generation Population III stars.
Dead Stars Have Been Snowing on Antarctica for 80,000 Years
Iron-60 doesn't form on Earth. So why is it showing up in 80,000-year-old Antarctic ice — and what dead star left it there?
A Ghost Galaxy Called Loki Is Lurking in the Milky Way
Ancient stars hiding in the galactic plane share identical chemistry but opposite orbits. Remnants of a galaxy the Milky Way devoured at the dawn of time.
The Big Bang Made Two Universes. We Got the One Going Forward.
A math-supported theory proposes that matter exists because the Big Bang created a mirror twin running in reverse. That twin may also explain dark energy.
Hellish Sulfur World Is Off the Charts
A planet 35 light-years away has a sulfur atmosphere that should have burned off billions of years ago. Astronomers had to create a new category to describe it.