Space

Planetary Science

Here’s how NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter has spent 1 year on Mars

The first flying robot on the Red Planet arrived as a technology demonstration. It’s now a trusty scout for its rover partner, Perseverance.

Astronomy

Crumbling planets might trigger repeating fast radio bursts

Mysterious blasts of cosmic radio waves might be due to planets sweeping extremely close to their host neutron stars.

Astronomy

A newly discovered planet renews debate about how some giant worlds form

An implosion of gas may have given birth to this young exoplanet, which orbits too far from its star to have been built up bit by bit, researchers say.

Planetary Science

This is the biggest known comet in our solar system

The nucleus of comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein is about 120 kilometers across — about twice the width of Rhode Island — and is darker than coal.

Planetary Science

New thermal maps of Neptune reveal surprising temperature swings

Neptune's atmospheric temperatures show a global drop and later, a weird isolated spike at the south pole. Scientists don't yet know why.

Planetary Science

Mars has two speeds of sound

High-pitched clacks from a laser on NASA’s Perseverance rover zapping rocks traveled faster than the lower-pitched hum of the Ingenuity helicopter’s blades.

Astronomy

A star nicknamed ‘Earendel’ may be the most distant yet seen

Analyzing Hubble Space Telescope images revealed a star whose light originates from about 12.9 billion light-years away, researchers say.

Space

Binary stars keep masquerading as black holes

The drive to find black holes in ever-larger astronomy datasets is leading some researchers astray.

Astronomy

When the Magellanic Clouds cozy up to each other, stars are born

The Magellanic Clouds, the two closest star-making galaxies to the Milky Way, owe much of their stellar creativity to each other.

Astronomy

Here’s the best timeline yet for the Milky Way’s big events

A new study puts more precise dates on when the Milky Way formed its thick disk and collided with a neighboring galaxy.

Physics

Levitating plastic beads mimic the physics of spinning asteroids

"Tabletop asteroids," buoyed by sound waves, hint at why some loosely bound space rocks have odd shapes and can’t spin too quickly.

Astronomy

NASA’s exoplanet count surges past 5,000

With a new batch of 60 confirmed exoplanets, the number of known worlds in our galaxy reaches another milestone.