Astronomy

Image: First view of aerosols from MetOp Second Generation’s 3MI instrument

Octopuses’ response to a human illusion suggests a sense of body ownership

Changes in rock formations from before and after the mass extinction event 66 million years ago may reflect how dinosaurs acted as ecosystem engineers, shaping vegetation and even the meandering of rivers

Changes in rock formations from before and after the mass extinction event 66 million years ago may reflect how dinosaurs acted as ecosystem engineers, shaping vegetation and even the meandering of rivers

Kissing bugs are creeping across the U.S.—and they’re bringing Chagas disease with them.

Trial participants who received an increased weekly dose of Wegovy lost 19 per cent of their body weight in a year on average, but also saw a higher risk of painful skin sensations and nausea

Trial participants who received an increased weekly dose of Wegovy lost 19 per cent of their body weight in a year on average, but also saw a higher risk of painful skin sensations and nausea

This butterfly can hatch planets.

A study published in a recent edition of Astrophysical Journal Letters by researchers at the University of Manchester and Hong Kong University has charted the growth and evolution of IC418, spanning observations going all the way back to years after its discovery in the late 19th century.

Neutrinos are one of the most enigmatic particles in the standard model. The main reason is that they’re so hard to detect. Despite the fact that 400 trillion of them created in the Sun are passing through a person’s body every second, they rarely interact with normal matter, making understanding anything about them difficult. To help solve their mysteries, a new neutrino detector in China recently started collecting data, and hopes to provide insight on between forty and sixty neutrinos a day for the next ten years.

Just as Earth has its four familiar seasons, our Sun experiences its own version of seasonal cycles that affect life on our planet. But unlike Earth's yearly rhythm, the Sun's "seasons" unfold over an 11 year magnetic cycle that scientists are now understanding in entirely new ways.

For the second time in history, the gentle glow of the aurora has been captured in Mars's night sky. It’s a phenomenon we enjoy here on Earth and we can, to a varying degree of success predict its appearance. Now a team of scientists are learning how to predict when these spectacular light shows will happen on Mars too. It's a breakthrough that could one day help protect future astronauts on the red planet while also helping us to understand these beautiful displays work in alien skies.

I still remember the first time I saw Saturn through a 10 inch telescope when I was ten years old. It looked just like it did in pictures, a pale yellow disk circled by its stunning ring system. What I couldn't see then were Saturn's moons, including the small, icy world of Enceladus that has since become one of the most exciting targets in the search for life beyond Earth. This tiny moon shoots spectacular plumes of water from cracks in its frozen surface, plumes that contain organic molecules. But a new study suggests we shouldn’t get too excited about what these molecules actually tell us about the possibility of life.

A binary star that has puzzled astronomers for decades may finally be explained. The accretor star is sucking material from its donor star so rapidly that it can't contain it all and is forming a bright, circumbinary ring.

It’s really quite reasonable to assume the stars don’t move! Indeed that was the opinion of our ancestors however we now know they are far from stationary. Imagine a star racing through space so fast it could travel from Earth to the Moon in just three minutes. These are known as hypervelocity white dwarfs and they have puzzled astronomers for years. Now, a team of researchers have finally cracked the mystery of how they get launched at such incredible speeds.

When an interstellar object (ISO) travels through our inner Solar System, the immediate question is "Where did it come from?" There are only fleeing opportunities to study these, since their trajectories take them out of the Solar System pretty quickly. A new research effort aims to understand where the most recent ISO, 3I/ATLAS, originated.