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.
Astronomy
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?
A Black Hole Gave Itself Away by Eating a Star
Something roughly 30,000 light-years off course sat undetected at a galaxy's edge for who knows how long. It took an unlucky object wandering too close to reveal it.
Three in a Row: The Ghost Galaxies That Lost 85% of Their Mass
A dozen small galaxies hang in a line. Three of them weigh a fraction of what they should. Whatever stripped them hit all three the same way.
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.
Betelgeuse Has Been Hiding a Companion for a Hundred Years
Astronomers pointed instruments at this star for a century without noticing what was sitting right next to it, and it's heavier than anyone guessed.
The First Moon Found Outside Our Solar System Is Technically Not a Moon
More than 6,000 planets beyond our solar system have been catalogued, and exactly zero confirmed satellites. The best candidate yet does not circle a planet at all.
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.
The Galaxy You Are Standing In Was Upside Down 10 Billion Years Ago
Something hit the Milky Way so hard it flipped. What that means for every star in it, including ours, is still being worked out.
The Asteroid That Vanished From Radar Came Back a Comet
For almost three decades, astronomers tracked what looked like an ordinary rock with total confidence. Then a routine observation came up empty, and what reappeared in its place wasn't ordinary at all.