2+ hour, 43+ min ago   (878+ words) What happens to Webb’s mysterious little red dots as the universe ages? The Saguaro galaxy’s red nucleus offers a way to explore their hidden surroundings. When the James Webb Space Telescope began finding tiny, intensely red sources in the early…...

22+ hour, 58+ min ago   (378+ words) The small moons inside Neptune’s rings may be the surviving debris of a much larger moon system destroyed when Triton was captured billions of years ago. Neptune’s smallest moons look like minor members of the solar system. They are difficult…...

1+ day, 1+ hour ago   (663+ words) The cosmic microwave background is the oldest light we can observe. Here is where it came from, what its tiny patterns reveal, and why it still matters. About 380,000 years after the Big Bang, the expanding universe had cooled enough for…...

1+ day, 22+ hour ago   (669+ words) The first permanent foothold on the Moon will not begin with a crew stepping out of a lander and planting a flag beside a finished habitat. It will begin with cargo arriving early, systems being tested in a place that…...

3+ day, 17+ hour ago   (924+ words) Hubble has found a growing ten-sided atmospheric wave around Saturn’s south pole—the first large regular-sided jet seen there. Saturn has long been known for a strange shape in its clouds. A vast hexagon circles the planet’s north pole, holding…...

3+ day, 19+ hour ago   (1153+ words) The objects are unusually soft in X-rays but bright in extreme ultraviolet light—exactly the combination that makes them difficult to find and potentially important to the history of stars and galaxies. A galaxy can be full of powerful objects…...

3+ day, 22+ hour ago   (374+ words) What might happen when the ingredients of life have an entire landscape in which to react? On Titan, NASA hopes to investigate that question by flying from one patch of ground to another. The update also highlighted the name of…...

4+ day, 20+ hour ago   (556+ words) A brilliant X-ray source is not automatically a black hole. Matter falling toward a neutron star can also become intensely luminous, and some neutron stars have surprised astronomers by producing far more radiation than expected. Identifying the object requires evidence…...

4+ day, 23+ hour ago   (495+ words) giving astronomers a new counterpart to the planet’s famous northern hexagon. The southern pattern appears to be evolving, raising a question that a single striking image cannot answer: will it become another enduring feature of the planet’s weather? A study…...

4+ day, 23+ hour ago   (493+ words) Twenty-seven faint objects beyond Neptune have emerged from a deep James Webb Space Telescope survey, extending the search for the solar system’s building blocks to worlds only kilometres across. Hubble observations of part of the sample add a second clue:…...