Readers of a certain age will remember a golden era of asteroid films, capped by two with very different endings. “Deep Impact” drove home the devastating consequences of letting a large piece of rock hit our planet, whereas “Armageddon,” though arguably the kitschier of the two films, was an uplifting story about technical ingenuity and […]

Our sun is capable of storms far bigger than we’ve ever recorded. Studying the world’s oldest trees suggests we could soon be due one of these gargantuan events.

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In two separate papers published in Physical Review Letters, researchers investigated the nuclear reactions that take place inside supernovae and X-ray bursts—two of the universe’s most powerful explosions. Together, the findings will help scientists build more accurate models of how stars explode and how newly formed elements are produced.

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Astronomers have discovered that the jet of a distant blazar has been gravitationally lensed by an unseen source of dark matter. Led by Silke Britzen at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Germany, the team’s results could prove especially important for observations of cosmic neutrinos, which are likely produced in abundance alongside a […]

You may have heard the phrase “we are made of star-stuff.” This statement by the astronomer Carl Sagan refers to the fact that elements heavier than hydrogen and helium were forged in the centers of the first stars. But how does this star-stuff evolve into the chemistry of rocks, plants and people?

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Astronomers have linked an X-ray flash discovered by the Einstein Probe to a known type of supernova with unusual features that point to the birth of an ultra-dense, rapidly spinning magnetar. The paper outlining this finding was published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters on July 22.

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NASA is planning to send three small rovers to the moon with a single instruction: Work out among yourselves how to explore a patch of ground.

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Neptune’s moon and ring system stand out among the giant planets because of the strange imbalance between its one very large moon and its many tiny moons. Its largest moon, Triton, makes up more than 99% of the mass of all satellites orbiting the planet while orbiting retrograde compared with Neptune’s rotation. The predominant theory […]