1+ day, 34+ min ago   (1012+ words) Around the SKA telescope, old star stories survive through practical knowledge, new meanings and changing community traditions. (CREDIT: Shutterstock) Long before enormous radio dishes began rising from South Africa’s Karoo, people there were already watching the sky. They used celestial…...

3+ day, 2+ hour ago   (1128+ words) Cosmic rays may erode icy interstellar objects far faster than expected, suggesting ‘Oumuamua could once have been much larger. (CREDIT: Credit: European Southern Observatory/M. Kornmesser/ NASA) Interstellar space may look empty, but an icy object drifting between the stars…...

4+ day, 34+ min ago   (1268+ words) Simulations show drifting icy pebbles can build 10-Earth-mass cores for Jupiter-like planets in only about 200,000 years. (CREDIT: Shutterstock) Building something as massive as Jupiter presents planetary scientists with a timing problem. A giant planet must assemble a large solid core…...

4+ day, 2+ hour ago   (1158+ words) MeerKAT directly detected faint hydrogen from billions of years ago, opening a new way to map the cosmic web without optical surveys. (CREDIT: Shutterstock) A whisper of hydrogen that traveled across the Universe for billions of years has been pulled…...

5+ day, 2+ hour ago   (1103+ words) Black hole ringdown waves may reveal hidden matter or new physics through distinct changes in frequency and damping. (CREDIT: Nagoya University) After two black holes collide, the newly formed object does not immediately become quiet. It vibrates, sending gravitational waves…...

1+ week, 1+ day ago   (915+ words) Researchers observed bright flares of X-ray emissions, produced as gas falls into a supermassive black hole. (CREDIT: Dan Wilkins) A black hole nearly 800 million light-years away briefly revealed something that should ordinarily have been hidden from view. The discovery, published…...

1+ week, 3+ day ago   (1208+ words) Nanoscale imaging shows ice can form across flat microcline surfaces without relying only on cracks or step edges. (CREDIT: Bielefeld University/Magnus Krenz) A mineral surface does not always need a crack, pore or other obvious defect to help ice…...

1+ week, 5+ day ago   (1208+ words) Radio telescopes on the Moon’s far side could detect ancient hydrogen and reveal the universe before the first stars formed. (CREDIT: Shutterstock) The far side of the Moon is a battered landscape of mountains, basins and overlapping craters, strikingly different…...

1+ week, 6+ day ago   (1201+ words) Experiments show strong stellar magnetic fields can stop coronal mass ejections, helping explain why astronomers rarely detect them. (CREDIT: Shutterstock) Some of the most active stars in the galaxy appear capable of producing enormous eruptions, yet astronomers rarely see those…...

1+ week, 6+ day ago   (962+ words) A powerful pulsed magnet expands the shock layer around spacecraft models, advancing a possible new approach to surviving reentry heat. (CREDIT: Shutterstock) A spacecraft plunging into an atmosphere faces an environment violent enough to heat the gas around its surface…...