All articles
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Astronomy
Quasars are the most luminous objects in the universe — and they tell us how galaxies are built
When Maarten Schmidt measured the redshift of 3C 273 in 1963, he realized he was looking at something 2 billion light-years away outshining entire galaxies. Sixty years later, quasars are understood as the most extreme phase of supermassive black hole growth — and keys to understanding how every large galaxy, including ours, formed.
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Science & Discovery
For 30 years, the Sun appeared to be broken. Then we realized the problem was the neutrino.
Ray Davis built a detector in a gold mine and counted solar neutrinos for decades — finding only a third of what theory predicted. The discrepancy that resulted forced physicists to rewrite the Standard Model and earned two Nobel Prizes.
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Stargazing
The summer Milky Way is the most spectacular thing you can see with your eyes — here's how to find it
From late June through September, the galactic center passes overhead for northern hemisphere observers, and the Milky Way glows brightest toward Scorpius and Sagittarius. This is what you're looking at, how to find it, and what to look for within it.
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Astronomy
Every massive object in the universe is also a telescope — and we've learned to use them
Einstein predicted in 1915 that gravity bends light. Eddington confirmed it in 1919. A century later, gravitational lensing has become one of the most productive techniques in observational astronomy — revealing dark matter, finding exoplanets, and letting us see the first galaxies.
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Missions
The most pristine object we have ever visited rewrote the story of how planets are made
On New Year's Day 2019, New Horizons flew past Arrokoth — a snowman-shaped contact binary in the Kuiper Belt, 6.6 billion kilometers from Earth. What it found there upended the dominant theory of how planetesimals form and pointed toward a gentler, quieter origin for the building blocks of planets.
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NASA & Agencies
ESA's JUICE is threading five planetary flybys to reach the most interesting moons in the solar system
Launched in April 2023, JUICE — Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer — will arrive at Jupiter in 2031 after a gravity-assist marathon. Its destination is Ganymede, where it will become the first spacecraft ever to orbit a moon other than our own.
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Stargazing
The Perseids peak in August — here's how to make the most of the best meteor shower of the year
Every August, Earth plows through the dusty wake of Comet Swift-Tuttle, producing up to a hundred meteors an hour from a single radiant point in Perseus. The Perseids are reliable, rich in fireballs, and require no equipment. Here's everything you need to catch them.
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Science & Discovery
Fast radio bursts are the most energetic millisecond events in the universe — and we're finally finding their sources
For two decades, fast radio bursts were detected but unexplained — extragalactic flashes of radio energy that lasted a millisecond and were gone. CHIME changed the scale of the problem. A magnetar flare in 2020 finally pointed toward an answer.
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Astronomy
The Milky Way's skeleton is made of ghost stars — and Gaia is mapping every one
Gaia has revealed dozens of stellar streams threading through the galaxy — thin ribbons of stars from ancient satellite galaxies and globular clusters torn apart over billions of years. Astronomers are now reading them for evidence of dark matter and the Milky Way's violent past.
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Science & Discovery
After a century of searching, we know where at least some cosmic rays come from
Victor Hess discovered cosmic rays in 1912 but could not trace their origin — magnetic fields erase their direction in transit. More than a century later, IceCube has linked high-energy neutrinos to NGC 1068, the first confirmed extragalactic neutrino source.
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Science & Discovery
Magnetars are neutron stars with magnetic fields strong enough to restructure atoms — and they are reshaping our understanding of dense matter
A magnetar packs the mass of the Sun into a sphere the size of a city, then generates a magnetic field 10^15 times stronger than Earth's. The physics at work inside them cannot be reproduced in any terrestrial laboratory — which makes their X-ray and radio bursts the only experimental data we have on matter at nuclear density.
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Missions
Perseverance is building the strongest case yet for ancient life on Mars — one core sample at a time
The Jezero crater delta is the most geologically promising site ever studied on Mars. Perseverance has now cored and cached dozens of samples — including Cheyava Falls, a rock whose leopard-spot textures and organic chemistry are the best candidate biosignatures yet found on another world.
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