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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

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

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.

Authors including literary heavyweight Ian McEwan and big hitters John Scalzi, Yume Kitasei and Cixin Liu have new sci-fi novels out this month

Authors including literary heavyweight Ian McEwan and big hitters John Scalzi, Yume Kitasei and Cixin Liu have new sci-fi novels out this month

A new concept for a next generation space telescope could provide an affordable breakthrough in the hunt for Earth's twin.

The Solar Orbiter spacecraft sometimes lies directly between the sun and Earth, making it ideally placed to analyse powerful solar storms that could damage electronic systems on our planet

The Solar Orbiter spacecraft sometimes lies directly between the sun and Earth, making it ideally placed to analyse powerful solar storms that could damage electronic systems on our planet

Deep in the constellation Scorpius, about 3,400 light years from Earth, a spectacular cosmic butterfly is revealing fundamental secrets about how worlds like our own came to exist. Using the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have peered into the heart of the Butterfly Nebula and discovered clues that could transform our understanding of rocky planet formation.

What role can the relationship between oxygen (O2) and ozone (O3) in exoplanet atmospheres have on detecting biosignatures? This is what a recent study submitted to Astronomy & Astrophysics hopes to address as an international team of researchers investigated novel methods for identifying and analyzing Earth-like atmospheres. This study has the potential to help scientists develop new methods for identifying exoplanet biosignatures, and potentially life as we know it.

When NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft returned from its mission to asteroid Bennu in 2023, it brought back more than just ancient space rocks, it delivered answers to puzzles that have baffled astronomers for years. Among the most intriguing questions was why asteroids that should look identical through telescopes appear strikingly different colours from Earth.

The recent discovery of the third known interstellar object (ISO), 3I/ATLAS, has brought about another round of debate on whether these objects could potentially be technological in origin. Everything from random YouTube channels to tenured Harvard professors have thoughts about whether ISOs might actually be spaceships, but the general consensus of the scientific community is that they aren’t. Overturning that consensus would require a lot of “extraordinary evidence”, and a new paper led by James Davenport at the DiRAC Institute at the University of Washington lays out some of the ways that astronomers could collect that evidence for either the current ISO or any new ones we might find.