Astronomers detected signs of a smelly, toxic gas that microbes can make in the planet’s clouds Venus’ clouds appear to contain a smelly, toxic gas that could be produced by bacteria, a new study suggests. Chemical signs of the gas phosphine have been spotted in observations of the Venusian atmosphere,Continue Reading
Not only is the mysterious substance invisible, but it’s also not all where we thought it was Dark matter just got even more puzzling. This unidentified stuff, which makes up most of the mass in the cosmos, is invisible but detectable by the way it gravitationally tugs on objects likeContinue Reading
The bizarre geometry of this system is the first known of its kind In one of the most complex cosmic dances astronomers have yet spotted, three rings of gas and dust circle a trio of stars. The star system GW Orionis, located about 1,300 light-years away in the constellation Orion,Continue Reading
Meteorites suggest that H2O in the mantle comes from local origins, contrary to expectations Earth’s deep stores of water may have been locally sourced rather than trucked in from far-flung regions of the solar system. A new analysis of meteorites from the inner solar system — home to the fourContinue Reading
Future telescopes could make similar maps to predict solar eruptions The sun’s wispy upper atmosphere, called the corona, is an ever-changing jungle of sizzling plasma. But mapping the strength of the magnetic fields that largely control that behavior has proved elusive. The fields are weak and the brightness of theContinue Reading
Telescope observations of thousands of these stripped-down stars confirm the trend Telescope observations have confirmed a weird property of white dwarf stars: As they pack on more mass, they shrink in size. White dwarfs, the stripped cores of dead stars, are thought to have this counterintuitive quality because they containContinue Reading
A less-lumpy cosmos could hint at cracks in physicists’ understanding of the cosmos The universe is surprisingly smooth. A new measurement reveals that the universe is less clumpy than predicted, physicists report in a series of papers posted July 30 at arXiv.org. The discrepancy could hint at something amiss withContinue Reading
It takes a certain amount of heat to keep an ocean wet. For Jupiter’s largest moons, a new analysis suggests a surprising source for some of that heat: each other. Three of the gas giant’s four largest moons, Ganymede, Callisto and Europa, are thought to harbor oceans of liquid waterContinue Reading
A new book looks at the Big Crunch, the Big Rip and more terrifying scenarios The universe is expanding at an accelerating clip, and that evolution, physicists expect, will lead the cosmos to a conclusion. Scientists don’t know quite what that end will look like, but they have plenty ofContinue Reading
Three spacecraft from three countries are now on their way to the Red Planet NASA’s Perseverance rover took off at 7:50 a.m. EDT on July 30 from Cape Canaveral, Fla., and is now on its way to Mars with a suite of instruments designed to search for ancient life. TheContinue Reading