We usually think of auroras as beautiful lights in the night sky. I see them as visible traces of a connection between the sun, Earth's magnetic field and the atmosphere. This led me to an origin-of-life question: Could the ...
In 1967, a solar storm nearly triggered World War III by jamming early-warning radar systems in the United States, causing U.S. leaders to think the Soviet Union was responsible. Though society averted catastrophe thanks ...
Planetary Sciences
Sep 7, 2026
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22
Current gravitational-wave observatories aren't sensitive enough to capture the gravitational waves of binary stars. They can only see the gravitational chirps of black holes just as they are merging. But that will change ...
Astronomy
Sep 7, 2026
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138
In 2012, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) was commissioned to measure the effect of dark energy, the mysterious force driving the expansion of the cosmos. Since then, the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys have obtained ...
Astronomy
Sep 7, 2026
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38
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), the largest multispectral imaging and spectroscopic redshift survey of the cosmos, has released its 20th data release (DR 20). It is also the third release of the survey's fifth phase ...
Astronomy
Sep 7, 2026
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34
"Seeing the Earth from above is a powerful reminder of our interdependence," said Thomas Pesquet. The words of France's 10th astronaut to head into space are a reminder of how we are "in this together," something the world's ...
Space Exploration
Sep 7, 2026
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8
Using more than 15 years of observations from the Parkes radio telescope, astronomers detected three rotational glitches in the pulsar PSR J1637−4642—a young neutron star that had shown no signs of glitches since its discovery. ...
Germany's Isar Aerospace launched a rocket into orbit from Norway on Saturday as Europe races to boost its ability to economically send satellites into space independently of the United States.
Space Exploration
Sep 6, 2026
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30
In 1974, Stephen Hawking made a prediction that transformed our understanding of black holes. Black holes, he showed, are not truly black: They slowly lose energy through a quantum process now known as Hawking radiation. ...
Astronomers have found two clouds of hydrogen near the Whirlpool galaxy that appear to contain almost no stars. The clouds, discovered with China's FAST radio telescope, each contain roughly 3 million times the mass of the ...
