6+ day, 1+ hour ago   (428+ words) The stone defeated a rock saw, a drill and a sledgehammer, and that resistance was the first real clue to what it was. In May 2015, a prospector named David Hole was sweeping a metal detector through open box-ironbark forest about…...

6+ day, 20+ hour ago   (333+ words) MIT chemistry professor Mei Hong co-led the study with Professor of Planetary Sciences, Sara Seager, publishing their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Using nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy to track molecular structure in high resolution, Hong’s…...

1+ week, 1+ day ago   (216+ words) Strangely enough, Mars’ moons Phobos and Deimos were discovered much later than the moons of far more distant gas giants like Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus. Yet, scientists have long debated the true origins of these pint-sized satellites. Unraveling their history…...

1+ week, 3+ day ago   (379+ words) Visible light shows a galaxy’s familiar framework of stars, dust, and gas clouds. X-rays, however, reveal gas heated to millions of degrees by supermassive black holes, exploding stars, and scorching stellar winds. When researchers combine Chandra’s high-energy X-ray data with…...

1+ week, 4+ day ago   (437+ words) Roman’s flagship planet-hunting technique, gravitational microlensing, harnesses Einstein’s general theory of relativity. When a foreground star passes precisely in front of a background star, the foreground star’s gravity acts as a natural magnifying glass, bending and amplifying the background light....

1+ week, 6+ day ago   (386+ words) The Futura Team represents the pulse of Futura’s editorial department, bringing together a collective expertise dedicated to the dissemination of scientific knowledge. Rather than the work of a single author, every article published under this signature is the result of…...

1+ week, 5+ day ago   (279+ words) NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) caught the first faint dips in light as TIDYE-1b crossed its star every 8.83 days. To confirm the signal against the background noise of a volatile young star, Barber’s team used a specialized algorithm named…...

1+ week, 6+ day ago   (535+ words) The Futura Team represents the pulse of Futura’s editorial department, bringing together a collective expertise dedicated to the dissemination of scientific knowledge. Rather than the work of a single author, every article published under this signature is the result of…...

2+ week, 19+ hour ago   (332+ words) Discovered in 2004 by Australian astronomer Robert H. McNaught at Siding Spring Observatory, the comet bears the name of history’s most prolific individual comet finder. 220P/McNaught belongs to the Jupiter family of comets, a group of short-period icy bodies that complete an…...

2+ week, 1+ day ago   (321+ words) Led by Purdue University assistant professor Cauê Borlina during his time at MIT, alongside senior author Benjamin Weiss, the research team published their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Most space rocks have been altered repeatedly…...