Science & Discovery
All articles →-
Science & Discovery
Saturn now has 285 moons — and the count keeps climbing
A 2026 batch of discoveries pushed Saturn's moon tally to 285 and Jupiter's to 101. The new satellites are tiny, faint, and a sign that a new generation of survey telescopes is just getting started.
-
Science & Discovery
The Hubble tension: a 5-sigma crack in the standard model
Two rigorous ways of measuring how fast the universe expands disagree by about 9%, at better than five sigma. A decade of scrutiny — most recently with JWST — has failed to dissolve it, and the discrepancy may be pointing at physics beyond the standard cosmological model.
-
Science & Discovery
From one solar system to six thousand worlds
Thirty years after the first planet was found around a Sun-like star, NASA's confirmed exoplanet count has passed 6,000 — almost none of them ever directly imaged. The methods that found them now drive a far harder pursuit: reading their atmospheres for signs of life.
-
Science & Discovery
What a fleet of telescopes learned from our third interstellar visitor
The interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS has been probed across the spectrum — Webb found methane, ALMA found water unlike any local comet's, and X-ray observatories caught it glowing. A SETI search for technosignatures came up empty.
-
Science & Discovery
A nearby dwarf galaxy is a blueprint for the universe's first dust
Webb found unexpected dust-making in Sextans A, a chemically primitive dwarf galaxy — evidence that the earliest galaxies could forge solid grains by pathways unlike those that dominate today.
-
Science & Discovery
Saturn's wandering spin was never real — Webb found the culprit
For decades Saturn appeared to change its rotation rate, which should be impossible. Using Webb, researchers showed the 'change' was aurora-driven winds distorting the measurement — a planetary heat pump feeding itself.
