Astronomy

The New Scientist Book Club is currently reading Ursula K. Le Guin's classic science fiction novel "The Dispossessed". Here, her son Theo Downes-Le Guin considers the artistic process behind it – and why it still resonates today

The New Scientist Book Club is currently reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic novel The Dispossessed. In this extract from its opening, we get our first glimpse of the planet Anarres

The New Scientist Book Club is currently reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic novel The Dispossessed. In this extract from its opening, we get our first glimpse of the planet Anarres

Jupiter, Venus, and Mercury continue at dawn. The evening Moon meets Saturn while Fomalhaut looks on. Saturn's own biggest moon casts its shadow onto the planet, for one of the last times for 15 years.

The post This Week's Sky at a Glance, August 29 – September 7 appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

For this new Picture of the Month feature, the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope has provided a fantastic new view of IRAS 04302+2247, a planet-forming disc located about 525 light-years away in a dark cloud within the Taurus star-forming region. With Webb, researchers can study the properties and growth of dust grains within protoplanetary discs like this one, shedding light on the earliest stages of planet formation.

On September 2nd, Sky & Telescope will launch subscription access to our online articles. Subscribe to get full digital access to the website and magazine!

The post Sky & Telescope Announces Subscription Access to Website appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

Surgery, not antibiotics, might be the best way to treat chronic rhinosinusitis, a condition that leaves people with a permanently blocked or runny nose and a reduced sense of smell

Surgery, not antibiotics, might be the best way to treat chronic rhinosinusitis, a condition that leaves people with a permanently blocked or runny nose and a reduced sense of smell

Social media platforms will soon have to exclude children under 16 in Australia, but there are doubts over how age verification tools will work – and whether this is the right approach to deal with online harms

Social media platforms will soon have to exclude children under 16 in Australia, but there are doubts over how age verification tools will work – and whether this is the right approach to deal with online harms

SpaceX's Starship nailed its 10th-ever test flight on Aug. 26. Footage from the launch pad that day shows just how much power the giant rocket packs.

This sneak peek at 'Skin in the Game' is a battle of wits between galactic heavyweights.

Public health experts warn that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s leadership crisis—sparked by the White House’s efforts to oust CDC director Susan Monarez—could jeopardize national biosecurity, pandemic preparedness and disease outbreak surveillance

The glacial flood risks that Juneau is now experiencing each summer are becoming a growing problem in communities around the world.

NASA astronaut Zena Cardman poses for a portrait in a photography studio at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.

According to a recent study by a team from the University of California, Riverside, exoplanets could be used by astronomers to investigate Dark Matter - the mysterious mass that makes up 85% of matter in the Universe.

Now versions of the Great Filter argument had been around for decades (just like Fermi was not the first person to ask where everybody is), but the most comprehensive form of the argument comes from Robin Hanson in 1996.

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are some of the most powerful signals in the universe. They can emit as much power in a few milliseconds as our Sun does in several days. Despite their strength, we still don’t have a definitive answer to what causes them. That is partly because, at least for the ones that only happen once, they are really hard to point down. But a new extension to the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) might provide the resolution needed to determine where non-repeating FRBs come from - and its first discovery was one of the brightest FRBs of all time, which helped researchers track it with an unprecedented level of precision, as described in a new paper in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Scientists have retreated to deep beneath the French Alps to broaden the hunt for dark matter particles that could be "WIMPier than WIMPS."