Space
We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
- Space
In a rare event, the moon got a massive new crater
A crater as wide as two American football fields formed in spring 2024, a size expected roughly once a century. A NASA orbiter got to watch.
- Space
How realistic is Project Hail Mary?
Ryan Gosling is on a mission to save the sun — and Earth — from star-killing microbes. Science News dissects the science behind the sci-fi movie.
- Space
One possible recipe for life on Titan is a bust
An experiment mimicking conditions on the Saturn moon suggests that cell-like bubbles don’t form in methane lakes, puncturing hopes for alien life.
- Astronomy
A strange ‘chirp’ in a brilliant stellar blast points to a magnetar
Superluminous supernovas are the brightest stellar explosions in the universe. Astronomers may have found a mechanism that can trigger these events.
- Planetary Science
NASA’s DART spacecraft changed an asteroid’s orbit around the sun
A 2022 NASA mission changed the orbit of the asteroid Dimorphos around its companion. New data shows their joint orbit around the sun also changed.
- Plants
Chickpeas can grow in moon dirt and make seeds
Chickpeas produced seeds in simulated lunar soil, offering clues for future space farming.
- Planetary Science
A Titan collision may link Saturn’s tilt, its moon Hyperion and its rings
A new study proposes that a crash between Titan and another moon spawned Hyperion and, much later, destabilized Saturn’s inner moons into rings.
- Planetary Science
A chemical ‘Goldilocks zone’ may limit which planets can host life
Life needs nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus. But without the right balance of oxygen, these elements get locked away in planets’ cores.
- Space
NASA scraps its 2027 moon landing, adds two missions in 2028
Rather than land astronauts on the moon, the Artemis III mission will now focus on docking and space suit tests in low Earth orbit.
- Science & Society
On moonshots and Minneapolis
Space exploration can bring people together and reflect deep societal divisions.
- Earth
Metal pollution from a rocket reentry detected for the first time
Direct detection of lithium from a SpaceX rocket reentry offers new evidence that metal pollution from space debris could threaten the ozone layer.
- Planetary Science
Venus has a massive lava tube
A collapsed lava tube detected in 30-year-old radar data from Venus may be part of a much wider network of underground caves.
