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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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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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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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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.
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This article is about a strange new population of objects that the James Webb Space Telescope keeps finding in the early universe. They look like tiny, bright, red specks, and astronomers now call them Little Red Dots.
The surprise is not just that they exist. It is that they seem to show up everywhere Webb looks, starting roughly 600 million years after the big bang, and then mostly vanish by about 1.5 billion years after it. That pattern suggests astronomers may be seeing a short-lived but important phase in cosmic history rather than an oddball curiosity.
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This article is about why Jupiter’s moon Europa may be one of the best places in the solar system to look for life.
The basic idea is simple: Europa looks like a frozen ice ball on the outside, but scientists think it may hide a huge salty ocean underneath. If that ocean has water, useful chemistry and some source of energy, then it might have the ingredients life needs.
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This article is about how new James Webb Space Telescope images are helping scientists understand supernovae by studying the famous remnant Cassiopeia A.
A supernova is what happens when a massive star runs out of ways to support itself and catastrophically collapses and explodes. The article explains that scientists still do not fully understand exactly how that explosion works, even though they know the broad outline.
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This article is about a surprisingly basic question:
What exactly is one second?
Right now the official answer is tied to cesium atoms. But newer optical clocks are now so much more accurate that scientists are seriously considering redefining the second using a better kind of clock.
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This article is about one of the hardest periods in cosmic history to study: the time before the first stars and galaxies lit up the universe.
Scientists call the later part of that transition the cosmic dawn. The article explains how a new generation of telescopes and radio experiments may finally let us study that era directly instead of mostly guessing at it.
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This article is about a bizarre particle-physics idea called vacuum decay.
The scary version is that if it happened, a bubble could form and spread through space at nearly the speed of light, changing the laws of physics in the region it passed through. Inside that bubble, ordinary matter and life as we know them would no longer work.
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