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
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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Science & Discovery
A strange gravitational wave is reviving an old idea: black holes older than the stars
A peculiar signal recorded by LIGO has astronomers entertaining a radical possibility — that it came from primordial black holes born in the universe's first instants, which could also help solve the dark matter problem.
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Science & Discovery
After 11 years reading the Martian air, MAVEN goes quiet
NASA has ended its MAVEN mission after more than a decade studying how Mars lost its atmosphere. The orbiter rewrote our understanding of why a once-wet world dried out — and found auroras nobody expected.
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Science & Discovery
The little moon that sprays its ocean into space — and why it tops the list for life
Enceladus is a frozen moon of Saturn barely 500 kilometres across, but it does something no other world is known to do: it jets plumes of its hidden ocean directly into space, where a spacecraft can taste them. What's in those plumes has made it a prime target in the search for life.
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Science & Discovery
Two 1970s spacecraft are still calling home from interstellar space — but the lights are going out
Nearly half a century after launch, both Voyager probes are flying through interstellar space, the only human-made objects to leave the Sun's bubble. Their power is fading, and engineers are switching off instruments one by one to keep the faint signal alive a few years longer.
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Science & Discovery
The spacecraft that flies into the Sun's atmosphere — and keeps coming back
Parker Solar Probe has now made its closest approaches to the Sun more than two dozen times, screaming through the corona at 430,000 miles per hour. It is the fastest object humans have ever built, and it is rewriting what we know about our star.
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Science & Discovery
China's probe is closing on a tiny asteroid that may — or may not — be a piece of the Moon
Tianwen-2 reaches the quasi-moon Kamo'oalewa this month to grab a sample. Just as it arrives, a new study undercuts the leading theory of what the object even is — a reminder that we often visit worlds before we understand them.
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Science & Discovery
Curiosity found the richest haul of organic molecules yet on Mars — and a careful reason not to call it life
A rock the rover drilled in 2020 has yielded the most diverse set of carbon-bearing molecules ever detected on Mars, preserved for billions of years in clay that once held water. It's a tantalizing result — and a case study in scientific restraint.
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Science & Discovery
The universe's hidden scaffolding, mapped in record detail
Using the largest survey JWST has yet undertaken, astronomers placed 164,000 galaxies onto the most detailed map ever made of the cosmic web — the filamentary skeleton along which all structure in the universe is strung.
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Science & Discovery
11,000 asteroids in six weeks — and Rubin's real survey hasn't started yet
From a month and a half of warm-up data, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory has already logged more new asteroids than the rest of the world found all year. Once the ten-year survey begins in earnest, that figure becomes a rounding error.
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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.
