The most violent volcanic cataclysm ever seen in our solar system has been witnessed on Jupiter’s moon Io by NASA’s Juno spacecraft, with simultaneous eruptions covering an enormous 40,400 square miles (65,000 square kilometers). The synchronous eruptions point to a hitherto undetected network of interconnected magma reservoirs just beneath the volcanic moon’s lava-encrusted surface. The
Using the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), astronomers have tracked a 3,000 light-years-long cosmic blowtorch back to its source, the supermassive black hole M87*, which bears the distinction of being the first black hole imaged by humanity. The breakthrough could help scientists better understand what creates these powerful jets of charged particles that travel at speeds
One theory is that life was more adapted to the extreme conditions of limited oxygen and little to no light, or that life persisted at hydrothermal vents where it could produce food from other chemicals. Another theory is that life survived in meltwater ponds on the ice, like the cyanobacteria and algae that currently live on the McMurdo Ice Shelf in Antarctica. “These surface settings
It’s been 54 years since the last Apollo mission, and since then, humans have not ventured beyond low-Earth orbit. But that’s all about to change with next week’s launch of the Artemis II mission from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. This is the first crewed flight of NASA’s Artemis program and the first time
The discovery comes from an international team of researchers involved in GreenDrill, a project led by the University at Buffalo and Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. The team drilled through more than 1,600 feet of ice to extract ancient rock and sediment buried beneath the Prudhoe Dome in northwest Greenland, and what they found has
A frozen lake in Czechia turned an ominous green color, a warning sign of ecological changes due to a warming climate. Researchers from the Biology Center of the Czech Academy of Sciences collected samples of a toxic blue-green algae bloom in Lake Lipno, which caused the ice to turn green in December 2025. Cyanobacteria blooms
Jupiter’s atmosphere and clouds have mesmerized stargazers for centuries, as their multi-colored, swirling layers can easily be viewed from powerful telescopes on Earth. However, NASA’s Juno spacecraft has upped the ante regarding our understanding of Jupiter’s atmospheric features, having revealed them in breathtaking detail. This includes images of massive lightning storms, clouds swallowing clouds, polar
An artificial intelligence (AI) tool has uncovered more than 1,000 strange cosmic objects in the Hubble Space Telescope‘s image archive, including some that cannot be explained by science. After searching with the tool for just two days, researchers found 1,300 oddball objects, including chaotic merging galaxies, stars trailing gas, and even some objects that haven’t
When the Undertones sang about “Teenage Kicks,” they could well have been inadvertently referring to the chaotic and violent “teenage” periods of planetary systems that are shaped by collisions between bodies of various sizes, such as the impact upon Earth by a massive body that created the moon. Now, using the world’s largest radio telescope
A gigantic bulge in the north rim of the Yellowstone caldera is the latest sign of volcanic activity in the national park. Geologists call this type of bulge “volcanic uplift.” It’s often caused by the movement of magma or gas underground. Dubbed the Norris Uplift Anomaly when it first appeared near the Norris Geyser Basin