NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite has found two “super-puff” planets in the same system, each one as light as cotton candy.
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Science & Exploration 01/07/2026 1022 views 25 likes The European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton and NASA’s Chandra X-ray space telescopes have spotted the aftermath of three bright explosions echoing through the outer spiral arms of our galaxy, the Milky Way. By measuring the distance to these echoes, they find the outer arms to be up to…
In celebration of the 250th birthday of the United States, NASA has unveiled four cosmic images from its Chandra X-ray Observatory rendered in red, white, and blue that represent the wonders of the universe the agency explores. The images are accompanied by a trio of new sonifications – a technique that translates astronomical data into…
Astronomers have glimpsed the inner structure of a dying star in a rare kind of cosmic explosion called an “extremely stripped supernova.” In a paper published in Nature, Steve Schulze of Northwestern University in the United States and colleagues describe the supernova 2021yfj and a thick shell of gas surrounding it. Their findings support our…
America at 250: The Revolutionary Spark A Smithsonian magazine special report “Force may subdue, but love gains”: The Quaker practice of conscientious objection evolved through Thoreau, Tolstoy and Gandhi before becoming the hallmark of the Civil Rights movement Jeff MacGregor | Writer-at-Large, Smithsonian Summer 2026 Getty Images The 1955-56 bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, was won by the…
While I’ve been going through early extraterrestrial ideas like those of Ronald Bracewell I’ve run back into that most unpronounceable of stellar objects, Przybylski’s Star. This one is worth a return look and I was reminded of it by author and futurist John Michael Godier on his Event Horizon podcast. I do few interviews but…
Looking for extraterrestrial life in the form of biosignatures will involve peering into the constituents of a planetary atmosphere and identifying out of equilibrium gases that tell us something biological is going on. But here’s the problem, as demonstrated recently in work on the exoplanet K2-18b. We’ve identified dimethyl sulfide at this world, which might…