The Rubin Observatory Will Catch Millions of Exploding Stars—And Maybe Rethink Reality
The universe is a violent place. Case in point: white dwarf stars, which sometimes decide that instead of dying quietly, they’ll detonate in a thermonuclear tantrum we call Type Ia supernovas. The NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory is about to catch millions of these...
Venus May Be a Death Trap, but Scientists Are Sending a Probe Anyway
Venus is the planetary equivalent of a locked biohazard lab, with sulfuric acid clouds thick enough to melt optimism. Any sane organism would avoid it. Instead, scientists are planning to send a probe straight into the inferno—because why not? Iaroslav Iakubivskyi, a...
Hubble Spots a Cosmic Menage à Trois in the Kuiper Belt—And It Changes Everything
The three-body problem has haunted mathematicians for centuries. Predicting how three gravitationally entangled objects move is a nightmare of chaotic physics, famously explored in the novel-turned-Netflix-show *The Three-Body Problem.* But out in the icy void of the...
The First Supernovas May Have Drenched the Universe in Water
The universe didn’t start with water. No cosmic waterfalls, no space puddles—just an endless expanse of hydrogen, helium, and a lonely dash of lithium. But then came the first stars, massive and short-lived, detonating in supernova tantrums. And in their fiery deaths,...
Backyard Astronomers Are Discovering Planets With a Global Spy Network (Of Telescopes, That Is)
Iván Venzor was eating dinner in Monterrey, Mexico, when he helped spot a new planet. Not with a high-tech space agency, but with a telescope sitting a few meters away in his backyard. A flicker of starlight, barely perceptible—and just like that, he might’ve found a...