9+ hour, 27+ min ago   (378+ words) The small moons inside Neptune’s rings may be the surviving debris of a much larger moon system destroyed when Triton was captured billions of years ago. Neptune’s smallest moons look like minor members of the solar system. They are difficult…...

3+ day, 5+ hour ago   (1203+ words) Twenty-seven faint objects beyond Neptune are giving astronomers a rare look at the planet-building material that survived when the outer solar system stopped growing. The outer solar system is not empty. Beyond Neptune, in the cold region known as the…...

4+ day, 8+ hour ago   (555+ words) A stone can be millions of years older than the monument built from it. Measuring when its minerals formed therefore cannot, on its own, reveal when people dragged it into place. To date a stone circle, archaeologists usually reconstruct the…...

6+ day, 7+ hour ago   (637+ words) Satellite constellations can leave bright trails across telescope images. Here is what that means for astronomy and the night sky. Satellites are changing the night sky in a way that has little to do with the old glow of city…...

2+ week, 1+ day ago   (559+ words) Ancient Egyptian artists were working with a much wider range of materials than the usual picture of "paint and glue" suggests. A new analysis of 28 microscopic samples from 14 painted objects found evidence for glues made from several animals, along with…...

2+ week, 3+ day ago   (517+ words) Enceladus’ south pole is cut by four long fractures that spray water vapour and ice into space. Scientists call them the “tiger stripes,” and a new model suggests that waves moving through the moon’s hidden ocean may help keep those…...

2+ week, 4+ day ago   (565+ words) Earth’s shadow will cover about 93 percent of the full Moon during the 27–28 August 2026 deep partial eclipse. It will be visible from the Americas, Europe, Africa, and western Asia. The full Moon will pass through Earth’s shadow on the night of…...

2+ week, 6+ day ago   (216+ words) China says its Chang’e-7 lunar south-pole mission will not launch in the planned 2026 window. Here is what the mission is designed to investigate. China has postponed the Chang’e-7 mission, its most ambitious attempt yet to study the Moon’s south polar…...

3+ week, 5+ day ago   (775+ words) Those signals are small. A transit can dim a star by less than one percent, while a star’s gravitational wobble may shift its spectral lines by only a few metres per second. Repeated measurements turn those tiny changes into evidence…...

3+ week, 6+ day ago   (811+ words) Researchers are using high-definition X-ray CT and virtual unwrapping to read cuneiform letters that remain sealed inside their ancient clay envelopes. For thousands of years, some letters from Mesopotamia have remained exactly where their writers left them: inside small clay…...