Science & Discovery
Space science and discovery from Cosmic Herald — planetary science, cosmology, astrobiology, and the search for life beyond Earth.
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Science & Discovery
The biggest 3D map of the universe ever made just got bigger. What DESI is finding.
The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument has mapped tens of millions of galaxies across billions of years of cosmic history. The results are testing whether dark energy — the mysterious force accelerating the universe's expansion — behaves the way physicists assumed it did. Early hints suggest it might not.
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Science & Discovery
Life on icy moons: what extremophiles on Earth are teaching us to look for
The search for life beyond Earth is increasingly focused on the subsurface oceans of moons like Europa and Enceladus. Understanding what that search requires means understanding life's extremes here first — and Earth's most extreme environments keep revealing biology that expands the definition of habitable.
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Science & Discovery
Mars had an ocean. New evidence is filling in how long it lasted.
Decades of Mars exploration have assembled strong evidence that the northern lowlands once held a vast ocean of liquid water. New analysis of orbital data and rover measurements is sharpening our picture of when that ocean existed, how deep it ran, and when it disappeared — which narrows the window when life might have been possible.
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Science & Discovery
Phosphine on Venus: four years later, what the research actually says
The 2020 claim that phosphine — a potential biosignature gas — had been detected in Venus's atmosphere sparked one of the most contentious debates in recent planetary science. Years of follow-up observations and analysis have clarified the picture, though not fully resolved it.
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Science & Discovery
The Sun is at its most active in two decades. What solar maximum actually means.
Solar Cycle 25 has been more active than forecasters predicted, delivering some of the strongest geomagnetic storms in years and producing aurora visible at unusually low latitudes. What solar maximum means for technology, satellites, and power grids — and how we prepare — is more relevant now than it has been in a generation.
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Science & Discovery
The Wow! Signal is 47 years old. We still don't know what it was.
On August 15, 1977, a radio telescope at Ohio State University detected something that fit every expected signature of a signal from extraterrestrial intelligence. It was never detected again. Decades of follow-up have generated hypotheses but no consensus. Here is where that investigation stands.
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Science & Discovery
How black holes actually grow: new X-ray observations are filling in the picture
Black holes grow by consuming nearby gas and dust — but the details of how that accretion works, and how it produces the relativistic jets that extend for millions of light-years, are still being worked out. A new generation of X-ray telescopes is catching the process in action.
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Science & Discovery
Three moons in the outer solar system have conditions that could support life. We've barely started looking.
Enceladus has a liquid ocean venting organics and hydrogen into space. Europa has a global ocean under an ice shell. Titan has lakes of liquid methane and a complex organic chemistry. All three are active targets for future astrobiology missions.
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Science & Discovery
The Oort Cloud is the solar system's outer shell. We've never directly observed it.
The Oort Cloud — a spherical shell of icy bodies at distances up to 100,000 AU from the Sun — is inferred from the orbits of long-period comets. It may contain trillions of objects and is thought to be the source of most comets that visit the inner solar system.
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Science & Discovery
Saturn's rings exist because of a mathematical boundary. Anything inside it cannot hold itself together.
The Roche limit is the distance at which a planet's tidal forces overcome a satellite's self-gravity, preventing it from accreting or tearing it apart. Saturn's rings sit inside this boundary for water ice, which is why they exist as rings rather than as one large moon.
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Science & Discovery
Every atom heavier than hydrogen was forged inside a star. Here is how that happened.
Stellar nucleosynthesis is the process by which stars manufacture every element from helium to iron in their cores, and supernovae and neutron star mergers produce everything heavier. The atoms in your body have a detailed provenance that astrophysicists have largely worked out.
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Science & Discovery
In the first fraction of a second after the Big Bang, the universe grew by a factor of 10 to the 26th power. Here's what we know about that.
Cosmic inflation — a period of exponential expansion in the universe's first 10^-32 seconds — was proposed in 1980 to solve three problems with the standard Big Bang model. Evidence for it is strong; direct detection of its signature in gravitational waves remains the goal.
