Astronomy

If this is Saturn, where are the rings?

Andromeda and Friends

Florida Northern Lights

Few cosmic vistas can excite the imagination like

What are those colorful rings around the Moon?

What does the Milky Way look like in radio waves?

Rather than being a recent cultural development, kissing may have been practised by other early humans like Neanderthals and our ape ancestors

Rather than being a recent cultural development, kissing may have been practised by other early humans like Neanderthals and our ape ancestors

To be fair, all scientific models are in some sense wrong

Galaxies grow massive through mergers with other galaxies. Massive galaxies like the Milky Way and Andromeda not only merge with other large galaxies, they also absorb their much smaller satellite dwarf galaxies. But these smaller galaxies can become quenched long before they're absorbed, and new research examines this process at Andromeda (M31).

If you enjoyed Beth Gardiner’s feature about big oil’s bet on plastics, here are more books curated by Scientific American

NGC 1068, a relatively nearby spiral galaxy, appears in this image released on July 23, 2025.

A comprehensive UN report has found that cities and towns are home to 81 per cent of the world’s population, much more than previously thought

A comprehensive UN report has found that cities and towns are home to 81 per cent of the world’s population, much more than previously thought

In recent weeks, at least 23 infants in the U.S. have been infected with botulism in an outbreak linked to ByHeart powdered infant formula

Ancient rock art was meant to be heard as well as seen and now acoustic archaeologists are bringing the sounds of prehistoric rituals to life

Ancient rock art was meant to be heard as well as seen and now acoustic archaeologists are bringing the sounds of prehistoric rituals to life

Watch an Oort Cloud comet disintegrate before your eyes. Meanwhile, interstellar intruder 3I/ATLAS is brighter than expected.

The post Comet K1/ATLAS Crumbles, Interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS Delights appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

All motion is relative. That simple fact makes tracking the motion of distant objects outside our galaxy particularly challenging. For example, there has been a debate among astronomers for decades about the path that one of our nearest neighbors, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), took over the last few billion years. A new paper from Scott Lucchini and Jiwon Jesse Hand from the Harvard Center for Astrophysics grapples with that question by using a unique technique - the paths of hypervelocity stars.

AlphaEvolve, an AI system created by Google DeepMind, is helping mathematicians do research at a scale that was previously impossible - even if it does occasionally "cheat" to find a solution