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In-depth, fact-checked space journalism
In-depth, fact-checked space journalism

Kepler's supernova of 1604 was the last one anyone saw in the Milky Way, but not the last to explode. Here is how dust hid others, and how the next one will be caught.

Less than one particle in a billion survived the Big Bang's great annihilation. The Standard Model has every ingredient needed to explain that, in doses far too small to work.

The night sky is dark mainly because the universe has a finite age, not because the Sun set. The blazing sky an infinite universe would give us is still there, stretched into invisible microwaves.

JWST picked up a possible dimethyl sulfide signal on K2-18b — but a tentative, contested 3-sigma whisper is not confirmed alien life. Here is what the data actually shows.

The final supernovae in cosmic history may be frozen stellar corpses detonating after 10^1100 years — if the proton turns out to be stable. Here's the open case.

A supergiant in Andromeda dimmed 10,000-fold and disappeared with no supernova. The numbers behind this 'failed supernova' point to a black hole born in silence.

JWST built the sharpest map yet of the universe's invisible dark matter scaffolding. Here's what it actually shows, what the headlines got wrong, and why depth beat width.

The particles drilling through your body right now didn't come from the Sun. They were flung out of exploding stars that died before humans existed — and they only survive the trip because of Einstein.

A radio burst arrived with nine evenly spaced peaks, like a cosmic metronome. The obvious explanation was a transmitter. The real one is far stranger — and entirely natural.

The Moon sits just 1.3 light-seconds from Earth — close enough to talk to, far enough that every Apollo conversation carried a built-in 2.6-second pause.

The Big Rip predicts dark energy will one day shred galaxies, planets, and atoms. But it is the least-supported cosmic fate — and 2025 data points the other way.

Shrink the Sun to a 0.5mm grain of sand and Proxima Centauri sits roughly 9 miles away — yet the space between them contains almost nothing. Here's what that tells us about cosmic emptiness.

A YouTuber building a replica helped scientists crack the Antikythera mechanism's last great mystery. Here's what the 2,000-year-old eclipse computer can now tell us.

For the first time, the James Webb Space Telescope has directly characterized the surface of a rocky exoplanet, and what it found is a dark, basalt-covered world with no atmosphere — eerily similar to the Moon.

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope detected methane and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of K2-18b — a temperate sub-Neptune 120 light-years away that may harbor a global ocean.

In 1925, Cecilia Payne proved stars are mostly hydrogen. The most powerful astronomer of the era told her she was wrong. It took four years for science to catch up.

A growing dent in Earth's magnetic shield is frying satellites and splitting in two. Here's what the South Atlantic Anomaly really means for our planet.

NASA's Dragonfly rotorcraft launches in 2028 toward Saturn's moon Titan — a world with methane lakes, a buried ocean, and chemistry that mirrors early Earth.

One galactic year ago — 225 million years back — the Sun occupied this exact region of the Milky Way. On Earth, the first dinosaurs had just taken their first steps.

Gamma Cassiopeiae blazed with X-rays 40 times stronger than expected for half a century. In 2026, the XRISM space telescope finally unmasked the hidden culprit: a ravenous white dwarf.

Around 42,000 years ago, Earth's magnetic field dropped to just 5% of its current strength. Here's what happened to the planet — and to us.

The SMILE satellite is set to launch May 19, 2026, and will capture the first-ever global X-ray image of Earth's magnetosphere — the invisible shield that keeps life on Earth alive.

NASA's Perseverance rover has uncovered wave-formed beaches and carbonate-rich rocks in Jezero Crater — the clearest evidence yet that Mars once had a stable, life-friendly lake shore.

The observable universe spans 93 billion light-years, yet is only 13.8 billion years old. Here's the physics that resolves this mind-bending contradiction.

HD 140283, nicknamed the Methuselah Star, has an age that rivals — and may slightly exceed — the universe itself. Here's how that's possible and what it tells us about cosmic history.

JWST data suggests LHS 1140b may be a nitrogen-rich water world with a liquid ocean — making it the most promising habitable-zone exoplanet ever found.

NASA shut off Voyager 1's Low-energy Charged Particles experiment on April 17, 2026. Only two instruments now remain active on humanity's most distant spacecraft.

For the first time since Apollo, humans flew behind the Moon — and witnessed a 57-minute total solar eclipse unlike anything ever seen from Earth.

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope captured the sharpest image ever taken around a black hole, revealing that 87% of the hot dust near the Circinus Galaxy's core is being consumed — not blown away.

Red giants are among the most extreme environments in the universe. Here's the physics of what would actually happen if you crossed into one — layer by layer.

The James Webb Space Telescope is finding black holes in the early universe so massive they outweigh their entire host galaxies — and nobody fully knows how.

White dwarfs are caught consuming their own planetary systems at an alarming rate. New JWST data reveals exactly how it happens — and confirms Earth faces the same fate in 5 billion years.

Every May, Earth slices through the debris trail of Halley's Comet, igniting one of the fastest meteor showers of the year. Here's the science behind the Eta Aquariids.

A Jupiter-sized planet orbiting a tiny M-dwarf star defies everything we know about planet formation — and JWST's atmospheric findings make it even stranger.

NASA's Roman Space Telescope shares Hubble's mirror size but captures 100 times more sky in a single shot — poised to map a billion galaxies and reshape what we know about dark energy.

For the first time since Apollo, humans are orbiting the Moon — and seeing its hidden far side with their own eyes. Here's what the Artemis II crew witnessed.

The Lyrids have blazed across April skies for 2,700 years — and most people have never heard of them. Here's the remarkable story behind the oldest recorded meteor shower still active today.

Neutron stars pack more mass than our Sun into a city-sized ball. One teaspoon of their material weighs around 6 billion tons — here's why that number is real.

Artemis II sends four extraordinary astronauts around the Moon — the first crewed lunar mission since 1972. Meet the commander, pilot, and mission specialists breaking barriers in deep space.

Voyager 1 has been flying through interstellar space for nearly 50 years powered by just 69 KB of memory and a physical tape recorder — less computing power than a digital watch.

In 2022, NASA slammed a spacecraft into an asteroid expecting a nudge. What happened next rewrote the rules of planetary defense forever.

New Juno data reveals Jupiter's lightning bolts may reach a million times the power of Earth's — fueled by ammonia storms over 100 km tall.