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A bubble with a ragged edge

This article argues that the Voyager spacecraft have done something more interesting than simply becoming the first human-made objects to enter interstellar space. They have exposed how incomplete scientists’ picture of the sun’s outer domain really was. For decades the heliosphere, the vast bubble carved out by the solar wind and the sun’s magnetic field, was easy to draw in a diagram and hard to observe directly. The Voyagers changed that. By surviving long after their original grand tour of the outer planets, they turned into the only functioning probes to sample the boundary between the sun’s influence and the wider galaxy from the inside out.

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The objects that should not move this way

Robin George Andrews frames “Dark Comets” around a simple but unnerving astronomical problem. Some small bodies in the solar system look like ordinary asteroids: they appear as bare points of light, with no fuzzy coma and no tail. Yet when researchers calculate their orbits, those bodies do not behave like ordinary asteroids at all. Gravity alone cannot explain their paths, and even the subtle shove from sunlight and the Yarkovsky effect is not enough. Something is nudging them.

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A cleaner way to watch a black hole feed

Yvette Cendes builds the article around one of astronomy’s most dramatic scenes: a star wandering too close to a supermassive black hole. Long before the star crosses the event horizon, gravity pulls much harder on the side nearest the hole than on the far side. The star stretches, unravels and gets torn apart in a tidal disruption event. Roughly half of its material is flung outward, while the rest settles into a hot accretion disk that briefly shines across the universe.

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Yuri Milner’s Breakthrough Starshot was announced as a new kind of moonshot: not a government mega-program but a billionaire-backed sprint to another star. The plan sounded almost mythic. A giant laser array on Earth would blast gram-scale spacecraft attached to ultralight reflective sails, accelerating them to about 20 percent of the speed of light and sending them toward Alpha Centauri. Sarah Scoles’s article follows what happened after the splashy launch and finds a more revealing story than simple failure. Starshot did not collapse because the dream was absurd. It stalled because even a dazzling idea cannot outrun the brutal combination of engineering difficulty, long timelines and a patron whose commitment turned out to be much smaller and less durable than advertised.

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What Juno changed

Robin George Andrews frames the article as a report from the end of an unusually successful planetary mission. Juno was sent to Jupiter to answer an old question with modern tools: what does the solar system’s largest planet really look like beneath its clouds, and what can that tell scientists about how the solar system formed? Instead of filling in a few gaps, the spacecraft seems to have broken much of the old picture.

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A space rock became a cultural crime scene

Dan Vergano’s article starts with a meteorite that is scientifically extraordinary but locally familiar. Near the Somali village of El Ali, the 13.6-metric-ton iron-and-nickel mass known as Shiid-birood, or “the iron rock,” sat in the landscape for generations. People folded it into stories and songs, chipped bits of iron from it, used it as a whetstone, and treated it less like a museum object than like part of the region’s lived history.

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A mission that is halfway to its real goal

Jonathan O’Callaghan’s article is not mainly about the Perseverance rover itself. It is about the awkward possibility that NASA may complete the expensive, glamorous first half of a historic Mars experiment and then abandon the second half before the science can pay off.

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What this article is really about

This article is about a change in how astronomers see the universe.

For a long time, space was often described as majestic but slow. Galaxies evolved over billions of years, stars lived and died over immense stretches of time, and most cosmic change seemed far removed from ordinary human experience. Ann Finkbeiner argues that this picture is now incomplete. Modern surveys are revealing a universe full of sudden, violent, short-lived events called transients: flashes that can appear without warning, blaze with absurd amounts of energy, and then fade on timescales of seconds, days or months.

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What this article is really about

This article is about a long-standing astronomical goal that is suddenly starting to look achievable: directly detecting the universe’s first generation of stars.

These stars, usually called Population III stars, formed when the cosmos was still chemically simple. They were made almost entirely of hydrogen and helium because heavier elements did not exist yet in meaningful amounts. That makes them important not just because they were first, but because they helped transform the universe from a relatively plain place into one rich enough to produce later stars, planets and, eventually, life.

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What this article is about

This feature is about one of the most appealing open questions in planetary astronomy: does the solar system still have a major undiscovered planet far beyond Pluto?

The article centers on the modern case for “Planet Nine,” a hypothetical world that would be larger than Earth, smaller than Neptune, and so distant from the sun that even powerful telescopes have struggled to spot it directly. Instead of seeing the planet itself, astronomers think they may be seeing its fingerprints in the strange paths of several icy objects at the edge of the solar system.