Astronomy

The current temperatures in western and central Europe would have been virtually impossible 50 years ago, and unprecedented humidity levels make this heatwave especially dangerous

Why does the Sun throw stuff at us? The Sun’s surface is a churning soup of energetic electrons and

What would it look like to fly past

Is this what will become of our Sun? Quite possibly.

What if you could see the entire sky -- all at once -- for an entire year?

Venus is now appearing on

Does this scene look familiar?

Anticrepuscular Rays over Sicily

The ESA's Euclid space telescope took 26 hours to capture this portrait of the Milky Way's central bulge. This isn't part of its primary mission; instead it's kind of like bonus science. It'll be used in the Roman Space Telescope's gravitational microlensing search for exoplanets. Regardless of the science, it's an impressive image.

For its first billion years the universe was lost in fog, a thick haze of hydrogen that swallowed light whole. Something burned it away, and astronomers have long wondered what. Now Hubble has caught a tiny, furious galaxy in the very act of clearing the murk, glimpsed as it was just 1.4 billion years after the big bang. It may be the smoking gun for how the universe first became clear.

Welcome to the final installment in the Fermi series, where we look at the impact that making contact with extraterrestrials could have and the rules governing how such an event should be treated.

A chip of zircon found in Western Australian rocks at a place called North Pole Dome revealed the age of Earth's oldest known impact crater. The team that found it was working on age-dating the crater, which is located in a region called the Pilbara Craton. They used mineral dating to pinpoint the exact time it was dug out by an impactor. Team lead Chris Kirkland from the Timescales of Minerals Systems Group within Curtin University's School of Earth and Planetary Sciences, said the findings help resolve a longstanding question about the timing of the impact. The results of the team's analysis of several minerals at the site, along with zircon, indicated that the North Pole Dome impact occurred at 3.024 billion years ago (plus or minus a few million years).

Stars form inside molecular clouds where cold gas collapses gravitationally on itself. But there's more to this process than gravity. New research shows how magnetic field lines funnel gas through sub-filaments into star formation sites.

Growing numbers of homeowners are installing batteries that store electricity when it is cheap, which helps balance the grid and cuts emissions, and cheaper plug-in batteries will soon let more people do the same

Growing numbers of homeowners are installing batteries that store electricity when it is cheap, which helps balance the grid and cuts emissions, and cheaper plug-in batteries will soon let more people do the same

We have identified the gene that, when activated, initiates the developmental programme that results in cells forming a human body

We have identified the gene that, when activated, initiates the developmental programme that results in cells forming a human body

The loss of Antarctica’s doomsday glacier would transform our planet. Now scientists are revealing the secrets of this remotest of places, and asking the question: is its demise inevitable?

The loss of Antarctica’s doomsday glacier would transform our planet. Now scientists are revealing the secrets of this remotest of places, and asking the question: is its demise inevitable?

For a long time, astrophysicists thought that the Universe's first stars, called Population III stars, were uniformly massive. It seemed like the conditions they formed in were calm and serene, which favoured massive stars. But new research based on high-resolution simulations show that conditions were more chaotic than thought, and gas cloud turbulence means that Population III stars were not all massive. This affected the metallicity of the next stars to form.