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Hidden within meteorites that fall to Earth are tiny spheres that have puzzled scientists for decades. These mysterious droplets, called chondrules, are time capsules from the birth of our Solar Syste and now, a team from Japan and Italy have used them to pinpoint exactly when Jupiter formed, solving a long standing planetary mystery.

Wait wait wait. There are other, less stressful options. I don’t want to end on such a downer note. There is hope for us yet!

For nearly a century, cosmologists have relied on a simplified model of the universe that treats matter as uniform particles that don't interact with each other. While this approach helped scientists understand the Big Bang and the expansion of space, it ignores a fundamental reality, that our universe is anything but uniform. Stars cluster into galaxies, matter collapses into black holes, and vast empty voids stretch across space, all constantly interacting through gravity and other forces.

When most stars like the Sun die, they don't go out with a bang, they fade away as white dwarf stars, Earth-sized remnants that slowly cool over billions of years. For decades, it was thought these stellar corpses were poor candidates for hosting life because they cool predictably, giving any orbiting planets only brief windows in the "habitable zone" where liquid water could exist. But new research suggests this assumption may be fundamentally wrong.

September’s night sky features the iconic Summer Triangle, almost directly overhead at nightfall, and a newcomer to the evening sky: the planet Saturn, which will rise in the east not long after sunset. Get tips for viewing these and lots more stargazing info by downloading this month’s Sky Tour podcast!

The post September Podcast: Hello, Saturn! appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

What created this unusual planetary nebula?

The diffuse

That yellow spot -- what is it?

What's hovering above the Sun?

Its surface is the most densely cratered in the Solar System -- but what's inside?

People who do several very short bouts of strenuous activity each day are much less likely to die in the next few years than those who do no exercise at all

People who do several very short bouts of strenuous activity each day are much less likely to die in the next few years than those who do no exercise at all

You can feast guilt-free on farmed oysters and mussels as their production can have environmental benefits – but those probably don't include capturing carbon

You can feast guilt-free on farmed oysters and mussels as their production can have environmental benefits – but those probably don't include capturing carbon

That the human mind treads a delicate line between order and disorder is a radical idea that’s gaining traction - and is changing our understanding of intelligence, consciousness and creativity

That the human mind treads a delicate line between order and disorder is a radical idea that’s gaining traction - and is changing our understanding of intelligence, consciousness and creativity

The European spacecraft en route to Jupiter, named JUICE, completed its only flyby of the planet Venus

The post Jupiter-bound Probe Flies By Venus appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

Our social voyeurism may have deep evolutionary roots