All articles
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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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Astronomy
Webb is revolutionizing the science of brown dwarfs — objects that blur every boundary we use to define a star
Too massive to be planets but too small to fuse hydrogen, brown dwarfs occupy an awkward middle ground. Webb is now probing their atmospheres with unprecedented depth — and finding objects that challenge everything from the definition of 'star' to the origin of Jupiter-mass bodies floating freely in space.
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Commercial
The satellites won. Now astronomers are learning to live with 40,000 of them.
Starlink, OneWeb, and their competitors have fundamentally changed the night sky. The question is no longer whether to stop the constellations — it's whether engineering fixes and international regulation can preserve professional astronomy before Vera Rubin comes online.
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Stargazing
The Night Sky for the Rest of June 2026: A Planet Parade, a Venus Occultation, and the Strawberry Moon
Mercury joins Venus and Jupiter in the evening twilight, the crescent Moon lines up with all three on June 16, then occults Venus on the 17th. Add the solstice, noctilucent clouds, and the low-riding Strawberry Moon on June 29 — your night-by-night guide to the rest of the month.
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