Robin Wordsworth re-creates the atmosphere of ancient Mars

Visitors to the village of Drumnadrochit, on the western shore of Scotland’s murky Loch Ness, come to see the nearby ruins of Urquhart Castle or to chance a glimpse of…

NASA’s DART spacecraft just smashed into an asteroid — on purpose

Mission control rooms rarely celebrate crash landings. But the collision of NASA’s DART spacecraft with an asteroid was a smashing success. At about 7:15 p.m. EDT on September 26, the…

Here is the first direct look at Neptune’s rings in more than 30 years

Humankind is seeing Neptune’s rings in a whole new light thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope. In an infrared image released September 21, Neptune and its gossamer diadems of…

Saturn’s rings and tilt might have come from one missing moon

A single, doomed moon could clear up a couple of mysteries about Saturn. This hypothetical missing moon, dubbed Chrysalis, could have helped tilt Saturn over, researchers suggest September 15 in…

Passing through the Milky Way’s arms may have helped form Earth’s solid ground

Earth’s journey through the Milky Way might have helped create the planet’s first continents. Comets may have bombarded Earth every time the early solar system traveled through our galaxy’s spiral…

The James Webb telescope spotted CO2 in an exoplanet’s atmosphere

The James Webb Space Telescope has gotten the first sniff of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a planet in another solar system. “It’s incontrovertible. It’s there. It’s definitely there,”…

A protogalaxy in the Milky Way may be our galaxy’s original nucleus

The Milky Way left its “poor old heart” in and around the constellation Sagittarius, astronomers report. New data from the Gaia spacecraft reveal the full extent of what seems to…

Passing through the Milky Way’s arms may have helped form Earth’s solid ground

Earth’s journey through the Milky Way might have helped create the planet’s first continents. Comets may have bombarded Earth every time the early solar system traveled through our galaxy’s spiral…

Here’s the James Webb telescope’s first direct image of an exoplanet

This is the first picture of an exoplanet from the James Webb Space Telescope. “We’re actually measuring photons from the atmosphere of the planet itself,” says astronomer Sasha Hinkley of…

The James Webb telescope spotted CO2 in an exoplanet’s atmosphere

The James Webb Space Telescope has gotten the first sniff of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a planet in another solar system. “It’s incontrovertible. It’s there. It’s definitely there,”…