Some planets seem to have it all. Jupiter is the largest in the solar system, spotting a distinctive and fashionable red spot, subtle but elegant rings and dozens of moons. As if that wasn’t enough, it looks as though Jupiter has 12 more small moons in its orbit, bringing the total number of natural satellites within its …
Jupiter Quietly Takes Crown for Most Moons, With New Tally of 92 Read More »
Saturn’s innermost moon Mimas may be hiding a vast subsurface ocean locked away beneath its icy surface, according to the results of a new study. Mimas is but one of Saturn’s eclectic family of 63 confirmed moons, which come in a dizzying array of shapes and sizes, from the stress fractured form of Enceladus to …
Saturn’s Death Star Moon May Be a ‘Stealth’ Ocean World in Disguise Read More »
Astronomers at the National Science Foundation’s NOIRLab made the first confirmed detection of a star system that will one day form a kilonova, an ultra-powerful and gold-producing explosion created by merging neutron stars. Researchers said on Tuesday that they used data from the SMARTS 1.5-meter Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile to uncover …
Astronomers find rare star system that will lead to gold-producing explosion Read More »
Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more. CNN — A scan of the skull of a 319-million-year-old fossilized fish has led to the discovery of the oldest example of a well-preserved vertebrate brain, shining a new light on the early evolution of …
A 319-million-year-old brain has been discovered. It could be the oldest of its kind Read More »
A still of Georges Lemaître from the rediscovered video. (Image credit: VRT) (opens in new tab) The only known video interview with Belgian physicist Georges Lemaître, widely considered the “father of the Big Bang,” talking about the birth of the universe has been rediscovered almost 60 years after it was lost. Lemaître (1894-1966) was a …
The Bay Area is in the middle of a frigid cold snap, driven by a blast of icy Arctic air. But winter temperatures on Mars can drop over 200 degrees lower. Amid these bitterly cold conditions, the Red Planet develops ice, frost and — at its coldest extremes — several feet of snow. This isn’t …
Here’s what snow looks like on Mars and it’s nothing like on Earth Read More »
In the past few weeks, the Subaru-Asahi telescope star camera has been capturing several bizarre sights in the night skies over Hawaii, including eerie blue spirals and ghostly green beams of light. According to researchers, these extraordinary light shows have earthly origins and can be attributed to NASA and SpaceX. On January 19, researchers shared a …
In this latest image from James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), we’re seeing spiral galaxy LEDA 2046648 as it looked while the first multicellular organisms were clumping themselves together here on Earth. The spiral galaxy in the foreground of this latest image from JWST is a billion light years away; its light had to travel across …
Look! New JWST Shows a Billion-Year-Old Spiral Galaxy in Stunning Detail Read More »
Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more. CNN — Some 125,000 years ago, enormous elephants that weighed as much as eight cars each roamed in what’s now northern Europe. Scientifically known as Palaeoloxodon antiquus, the towering animals were the largest land mammals …
Neanderthals hunted and butchered giant elephants Read More »
This is the ninth in a series of articles exploring the birth of quantum physics. Over the past few weeks, we have explored some of the foundational concepts in quantum physics, from quantum jumps to superposition and well beyond. Today we explore what may be the weirdest of quantum effects, that of quantum entanglement, which …
Could a hidden variable explain quantum weirdness? Read More »
