HD 189733b looks deep blue from space, almost Earth-like at first glance — but its colour comes not from oceans, but from silicate particles in a scorching atmosphere where glass may rain sideways through winds of thousands of kilometres an hour.
In 1908, something exploded above the remote Siberian forest of Tunguska with enough force to flatten roughly 2,000 square kilometres of trees — and more than a century later, no impact crater has ever been found, because the object, probably a small aster
A Greenland shark studied in 2016 was estimated to be nearly 400 years old, meaning it may have been born around the time Shakespeare’s era was ending — and, astonishingly, would not have reached sexual maturity for more than another century.
When a dead whale sinks to the seafloor, its 'whale fall' becomes an oasis feeding deep-sea life for decades — up to 190 species crowding a single skeleton, with bone-eating worms gnawing the bones for as long as a decade
Enceladus, a tiny Saturnian moon only about 500 kilometres wide, is actively venting water vapour and ice grains into space from a salty ocean hidden beneath its crust — and modelling suggests that ocean may have remained warm and chemically active for
On 5 March 1982, the Soviet Venera 14 lander reached the surface of Venus, ejected the protective cap from its camera lens, photographed the surrounding terrain — and then lowered its mechanical soil-testing arm directly onto the discarded lens cap, returni
The reason no human being has walked on the Moon in more than half a century is not that humanity lost the capability to get there — it is that humanity lost the reason, in the moment the Cold War goal of beating the Soviet Union to the lunar surface had finall
In late 2023, Voyager 1 began sending unreadable data from interstellar space. NASA engineers eventually traced the fault to corrupted memory in one of the probe’s computers, rewrote part of its 46-year-old software, transmitted the fix across more than 24 bil
The tallest volcano in the solar system is so wide that from most places on its slopes, you would never see a dramatic summit rising ahead of you — Olympus Mons is broader than some countries, and its gentle flanks curve away with Mars long before the mou
Science news this week: Goblin shark filmed for first time, California close to a major quake, physicists split photon, and inside China's plans to 'tame nature'
The longest continuous spaceflight in history — 437 days aboard the Russian Mir space station, completed by cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov in 1995 — was specifically conducted to prove that a human being could survive a round-trip mission to Mars, in a piece
Point Nemo sits so far from any coastline that the closest humans to it are often the astronauts aboard the International Space Station passing overhead, not anyone standing on land.