Istanbul, Turkey: The Sturgeon full moon rises next to Istanbul’s Camlica Mosque. Chris McGrath/Getty Images hide caption toggle caption Chris McGrath/Getty Images Istanbul, Turkey: The Sturgeon full moon rises next to Istanbul’s Camlica Mosque. Chris McGrath/Getty Images Did you get a chance to witness the fourth and final supermoon of 2022? The last supermoon of … Read more
The present extinction rate of life on Earth doesn’t qualify as a mass extinction event yet — but current trends show that it eventually will, a new study finds. The number of species that are currently hurtling toward extinction has led many ecologists to argue that we are undergoing a sixth mass extinction — but … Read more
The main mass of the Aguas Zarcas meteorite at the Field Museum. Credit: John Weinstein, Field Museum In 2019, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft sent back images of a geological phenomenon no one had ever seen before: pebbles were flying off the surface of the asteroid Bennu. The asteroid appeared to be shooting off swarms of marble-sized … Read more
STEVE is being seen more often lately. Here is what has been learned about STEVE in recent times. STEVE is a bright show in the sky, to put it simply. Originally STEVE was thought to be a form of northern lights. It has been learned that STEVE is actually not part of the northern lights, … Read more
Earth and its Moon are unique in the Solar System. Earth is the only planet with just one moon, and that Moon is pretty influential. In fact, without the Moon, life on Earth may not have emerged, some research suggests. Couple that with a size ratio unlike any other planet-moon system we’ve seen – the … Read more
Betelgeuse first drew attention in late 2019 when the star, which glitters like a red gem in the upper-right shoulder of Orion, experienced an unexpected darkening. The supergiant continued to grow sun in 2020. Some scientists speculated that the star would explode as a supernova, and they’ve been trying to determine what happened to it … Read more
Betelgeuse, a red supergiant star, appears as a brilliant, ruby-red, twinkling spot of light in the upper right shoulder of the winter constellation Orion the Hunter. However, when viewed close up, astronomers know that it is a seething monster with a 400-day-long heartbeat of regular pulsations. This aging star is classified as a supergiant because … Read more
A team of scientists from Georgia Tech say they’ve built a robot that can move without anything to push against – a discovery that seems to violate the law of conservation momentum. The researchers were able to generate momentum without a surface to push off from by building a robot isolated from outside influences and … Read more
COVID screening in India, where cases caused by the BA.2.75 variant are rising.Credit: Mohd Arhaan Archer/AFP/Getty As countries await the end of COVID-19 surges caused by the variant BA.5, researchers are on the lookout for what will come next. An Omicron subvariant called BA.2.75 — and nicknamed ‘Centaurus’ by some on social media — is … Read more
So on after European astronomers developed the first telescopes at the start of the 17th century, they observed dark spots speckling the Sun’s surface. They also handed their modern successors a mystery. From about 1645 to 1715, the spots, now known to be indicators of solar activity, all but disappeared. Gathering sunspot counts and other … Read more