29 stories on space and science, newest first. Browse by section or search the archive.
A rock in an ancient Martian river valley carries chemical patterns that, on Earth, are usually made by microbes. NASA calls it a potential biosignature. The sample that could settle it may never come home.
One spacecraft has visited the seventh planet, for a few hours in 1986. Forty years on, even its basic facts are being revised, and the calendar of Uranus’s long seasons is making the case for a return.
The cosmic microwave background was released when the universe was 380,000 years old. Its faint ripples encode the universe’s age, contents and shape. Here is how to read them.
Astronomers can now measure the gases around a planet 124 light-years away. The rise and fall of the claims about K2-18b show what that technique can do, and how easily it can be over-read.
For twenty years, a tiny wobble in the muon’s magnetism looked like a crack in the Standard Model. The final measurement is in, and the crack seems to have closed. The real puzzle turned out to be in the theory.
The largest three-dimensional map of the universe hints that the force driving cosmic acceleration may be weakening. A 2026 reanalysis has made that evidence weaker, and more interesting.
Half a millimeter long and found almost everywhere, tardigrades can survive drying, freezing, radiation and even the vacuum of space. They are not indestructible. Their tricks are more interesting than that.
A photograph taken on Christmas Eve 1968 changed how people saw the planet, and it was turned on its side before anyone saw it. What the most famous pictures of Earth show, and what we did to them.
Light pollution is brightening the sky faster than satellite data suggested, and a growing fleet of satellites adds streaks of its own. What we lose when we cannot see the stars is not only astronomy.
