2+ day, 5+ hour ago   (934+ words) Scientists found that Mercury's roughest terrain may conceal ancient cliffs, suggesting the planet shrank substantially more than estimates showed. Mercury’s surface is crossed by long cliffs and ridges. They formed as the crust buckled to fit a planet that got…...

6+ day, 1+ hour ago   (825+ words) Black hole ringdowns could reveal signs of surrounding matter or new physics, giving scientists a new way to test gravity in extreme conditions. When two black holes collide and merge into one, the newly formed giant doesn’t just sit there....

1+ week, 1+ day ago   (992+ words) Waves too quick for older telescopes to see ripple through the Sun's polar corona, and they carry a big share of the fast solar wind's energy. Solar physicists can work out how much energy it takes to push the Sun’s…...

1+ week, 1+ day ago   (747+ words) Hubble reveals a vast cosmic bubble where massive stars cleared away gas, only for the compressed material around it to begin forming thousands of new stars. Today’s Image of the Day from the European Space Agency reveals a huge stellar…...

1+ week, 5+ day ago   (1231+ words) Physicists have spent six decades believing that high-energy particles trapped around Earth spread out through random scattering. A new paper just flipped that assumption on its head. For over 60 years, scientists believed high-energy particles in Earth’s radiation belts were scattering…...

1+ week, 5+ day ago   (1090+ words) One exploded star left behind six Earth masses of rocky planet material just 100 million years after the Big Bang, a simulation finds. Rocky planets are built largely from material forged inside earlier stars. Carbon, oxygen, and iron didn’t exist when…...

1+ week, 6+ day ago   (1237+ words) Sun vortices seen by the world's largest solar telescope confirm an old prediction and may explain how the star's magnetic energy builds. Something has to twist the Sun’s magnetic field into the tight coil that stores the energy behind a…...

2+ week, 20+ hour ago   (1227+ words) Extreme solar storms could expose airplanes to intense radiation while triggering thousands of errors in critical onboard electronics. On a quiet day, the atmosphere and Earth’s magnetic field stop most of the radiation from space before it reaches a plane…...

2+ week, 1+ day ago   (901+ words) Moon dust contains an ancient cosmic record, and a new mathematical model could help scientists read the stardust buried deep in its scrambled layers. When a massive star runs out of fuel, it blows itself apart and flings its guts…...

2+ week, 1+ day ago   (1105+ words) Astronomers found that the mix of stars changes across the Milky Way, challenging a basic assumption used to measure distant galaxies. Astronomers can’t see most of the stars in a distant galaxy. The faint ones give off almost none of…...