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Comet 2I/Borisov, the solar system’s second known interstellar visitor, probably hails from a planetary family that is chemically distinct from our own. During Borisov’s brief sojourn through the inner solar system, it was enveloped in its own tenuous gas cloud created as the sun baked ice on the comet’s surface (SN: 10/14/19). New observations of […] More
A new look at the nitrogen on Venus may overturn a decades-old assumption about the planet’s atmosphere. Scientists long thought that atmospheric turbulence would create a uniform mixture of gases in Venus’s atmosphere below an altitude of about 100 kilometers. That’s how it works on Earth. But data from NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft now indicate that […] More
As far as odd couples go, this is one for the record books. The ripples in spacetime stirred up by two distant, merging black holes suggest that one of the pair was much bigger than the other. It’s the first definitively mismatched black hole pair spotted by the LIGO and Virgo collaborations, which search for […] More
The brightest supernova ever seen may be the first known example of a rare type of stellar explosion. The supernova, spotted in 2016 in a galaxy about 4.6 billion light-years away, radiated about 5 sexdecillion (5 followed by 51 zeros) ergs of energy. That’s about twice the amount of radiation emitted by the previous record-holder, […] More
The sharpest images yet taken of the sun’s atmosphere reveal superfine threads of hot plasma draped across small regions that have appeared rather bland until now. Finding these slender strands is essential for understanding how energy moves around in the sun’s atmosphere, says Amy Winebarger, a solar physicist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in […] More
The first sign that Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity was correct has made a repeat appearance, this time near a supermassive black hole. In 1915, Einstein realized that his newly formulated general theory of relativity explained a weird quirk in the orbit of Mercury. Now, that same effect has been found in a star’s orbit […] More
SpacefarersChristopher WanjekHarvard Univ., $29.95 By 20th century expectations, we are way behind schedule on colonizing the solar system. After the Apollo moon landings, some scientists and NASA officials envisioned launching astronauts to Mars in the 1980s and building cities in space to be habitable by the 2000s. But the only humans in space today are […] More
The solar system’s first recorded interstellar visitor has a new proposed origin story. The enigmatic celestial object known as ‘Oumuamua might be a shard of a planet ripped apart by its star’s gravity, researchers suggest April 13 in Nature Astronomy. Ever since ‘Oumuamua showed up in our solar system in 2017, astronomers have struggled to […] More
