Science

A giant NASA radar in the remote Mojave Desert imaged some formidable asteroids — including a 1-mile-wide behemoth — as they passed through our planet’s neighborhood. Fortunately, there are no known asteroids that might potentially hit Earth for over a century, and the likelihood of an impact from the biggest class of asteroids (like the...

NASA’s Juno spacecraft zipped just 930 miles (1,500 kilometers) above the volcanic world Io this year. The extraterrestrial vistas, including a view of the most powerful volcano known to humanity, didn’t disappoint. “It’s absolutely stunning, stunning imagery,” Ashley Davies, a planetary scientist at the space agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told Mashable. Other space missions have captured...

A U.S. reconnaissance plane swooped through Hurricane Beryl — the earliest-recorded Category 5 storm to ever form in the Atlantic Ocean basin. The powerful hurricane capitalized upon anomalously warm sea surface temperatures and favorable atmospheric conditions to intensify into a powerful cyclone, with winds reaching some 165 mph. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration sent...

Astronomers say they’ve confirmed that three little red dots observed at the dawn of time by the James Webb Space Telescope are in fact galaxies, flouting theories about the early universe. Not only that, but researchers say those galaxies seem to host enormous supermassive black holes — perhaps 100 to 1,000 times more massive than...

Space and photography fans are in for a treat. The Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition has returned, with its sixteenth edition shortlist featuring a stunning array of photographs. London’s Royal Museums Greenwich received a whopping 3,500 entries from both amateur and professional photographers globally, each of whom captured a breathtaking glimpse of space. The...

Scientists analyzing samples NASA brought back from an asteroid got a surprise detection that may mean the space rock was once part of a long-gone ocean world.  What the team found was water-soluble magnesium-sodium phosphate in mottled stones — a mineral no one expected because it didn’t show up in any of the data the...

The universe may teem with tiny alien microbes. After all, scientists suspect such primitive organisms could even dwell nearby on other worlds in our very solar system — in briny oceans beneath shells of ice. We can’t be sure, of course. Microbes can’t beam us any messages. (Though we have plans to look for them.)...

Watch out, Martians. Meteorites slam into Mars five times more than planetary scientists thought, a finding published in the journal Nature Astronomy. This makes impacts on the Red Planet about a daily occurrence. A 26-foot-wide (8-meter) crater forms almost each day, and a nearly 100-foot (30-meter) crater is created once a month. Previous estimates of...

NASA captured an expansive view of the largest volcano known to humanity. The space agency used its 23-year-old Mars Odyssey orbiter to capture a never-before-seen view of Olympus Mons — a vista similar to how astronauts in a hypothetical orbiting space station might view the behemoth mountain. It’s 373 miles (600 kilometers) wide — about...