Astronomy

The U.S. Department of the Interior announced it would “pause” leases for five large offshore wind farms, imperiling the fast-growing clean energy industry

Waves of recent star formation have made Orion winter's most scintillating constellation. You can see how it all came to be.

The post Explore Orion's Massive New Stars with Binoculars appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

By requesting copies of the then-UK technology secretary's ChatGPT logs, New Scientist set a precedent for how freedom of information laws apply to chatbot interactions, helping to hold governments to account

By requesting copies of the then-UK technology secretary's ChatGPT logs, New Scientist set a precedent for how freedom of information laws apply to chatbot interactions, helping to hold governments to account

Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, may not have a subsurface ocean after all. That’s according to a re-examination of data captured by NASA’s Cassini mission, which flew by Titan dozens of times starting in 2004. By 2008, all the evidence suggested a subsurface ocean of liquid water waited beneath Titan’s geologically complex crust. But the latest analysis says the interior is more likely to be made of ice and slush, albeit with pockets of warm water that cycle from core to surface.

These two galaxies are named NGC 4490 and NGC 4485, and they’re located about 24 million light-years away in the constellation Canes Venatici (The Hunting Dogs). They are the closest known interacting dwarf-dwarf galaxy system where astronomers have observed the interactions between them, as well as been able to resolve the stars within.

From mudstones on Mars to strange gases in exoplanet atmospheres, tentative evidence for extraterrestrial life is starting to come thick and fast. But when we've found it, how will we know for sure?

From mudstones on Mars to strange gases in exoplanet atmospheres, tentative evidence for extraterrestrial life is starting to come thick and fast. But when we've found it, how will we know for sure?

Image: Euclid image of galaxy NGC 646

One of the primary goals of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is to detect atmospheres around exoplanets, to try to suss out whether or not they could potentially support life. But, in order to do that, scientists have to know where to look, and the exoplanet has to actually have an atmosphere. While scientists know the location of about 6000 exoplanets currently, they also believe that many of them don’t have atmospheres and that, of the ones that do, many aren’t really Earth-sized. And of those, many are around stars that are too bright for our current crop of telescopes to see their atmosphere. All those restrictions mean, ultimately, even with 6000 potential candidates, the number of Earth-sized ones that we could find an atmosphere for is relatively small. So a new paper available on arXiv from Jonathan Barrientos of Cal Tech and his co-authors that describes five new exoplanets around M-dwarf stars - two of which may have an atmosphere - is big news for astrobiologists and exoplanet hunters alike.

From vitamin C to your microbiome and mindset, the latest science of immunity is often counterintuitive. Here's how to give your system a fighting chance to overcome infection

From vitamin C to your microbiome and mindset, the latest science of immunity is often counterintuitive. Here's how to give your system a fighting chance to overcome infection

Are you dreaming of a white Christmas? The odds of snow on the big day comes down to a mix of climate and weather, scientists explain

From an interstellar comet to breathtaking auroras and from brand-new rockets to iconic space telescopes, here are some of our favorite images from the cosmos in 2025

Astronomers thought they had seen the "first hints of life on an alien world" this year, but they disappeared under closer scrutiny

Astronomers thought they had seen the "first hints of life on an alien world" this year, but they disappeared under closer scrutiny

A look back at 2025’s biggest science stories—from federal upheaval and public health setbacks to climate policy reversals and groundbreaking discoveries in space.

Mysterious ‘little red dots’ seen by the James Webb Space Telescope can be explained by a new kind of black hole enshrouded in an enormous ball of glowing gas

Mysterious ‘little red dots’ seen by the James Webb Space Telescope can be explained by a new kind of black hole enshrouded in an enormous ball of glowing gas

We have only just started to understand how our brains clean themselves, but columnist Helen Thomson finds promising evidence for how to boost this process