The world’s biggest sun-observing telescope spotted these swirls for the first time The most detailed pictures of the sun ever taken have caught a surprising new feature. High-energy whirlpools, it seems, speckle the surface of our star. The sun is a giant ball of superhot, electrically charged gas called plasma.Continue Reading
This is the black hole’s point of no return Event horizon (noun, “Ee-VENT hur-AYE-zon”) An event horizon is a boundary surrounding a black hole. Beyond this boundary, nothing — not matter, energy or any kind of information — can escape. A black hole is an ultradense object with extremely strongContinue Reading
Dec. 3, 2023: Our weekly roundup of the latest science in the news, as well as a few fascinating articles to keep you entertained. his week in science news, we saw SpaceX rockets punching temporary holes in our planet’s atmosphere, heard about new technology for smart glasses that use sonar,Continue Reading
The feature is at an altitude hidden to other telescopes New beauty shots of Jupiter, captured by the James Webb Space Telescope, reveal a speedy jet stream encircling the equator at an altitude never imaged before. Researchers have known about Jovian jet streams since Voyager spacecraft flew by in 1979.Continue Reading
Gamma rays reveal the galaxy’s star-making power The Milky Way is churning out far more stars than previously thought, according to a new estimate of its star formation rate. Gamma rays from aluminum-26, a radioactive isotope that arises primarily from massive stars, reveal that the Milky Way converts four toContinue Reading
The ring lies outside a typical, mathematically determined distance from the small world The dwarf planet Quaoar has a ring that is too big for its metaphorical fingers. While all other rings in the solar system lie within or near a mathematically determined distance of their parent bodies, Quaoar’s ringContinue Reading
Useful, cost-effective nuclear fusion remains a distant dream, despite a small step in the right direction from the government’s NIF reactor. Scientists have just announced a breakthrough in nuclear fusion ignition: For the first time the heart of a powerful fusion reactor has briefly generated more energy than was putContinue Reading
The planet 55 Cancri e, also known as the “hell planet,” appears to have been dragged closer to its sun’s equator due to a gravitational anomaly. Scientists studying a distant “hell planet” where clouds rain lava, the oceans are molten and the core is filled with diamonds have found thatContinue Reading
Greek astronomer Hipparchus is thought to be the first to attempt to precisely map the stars Fragments of a star catalog from the second century B.C. have turned up in a manuscript that had been erased and written over centuries later. A new analysis of the religious manuscript shows thatContinue Reading
The finding, based on more than 1,000 quakes, suggests the planet isn’t geologically dead Researchers have analyzed a slew of recent temblors on the Red Planet and shown that these Marsquakes are probably caused by magma moving deep under the Martian surface. That’s evidence that Mars is still volcanically active,Continue Reading