Science

  The ancient comet ‘Oumuamua (above) made waves in late 2017 as our first interstellar visitor, but of course, it wasn’t the first. It was simply the first one we ever spotted. Astronomers at Harvard University now say Earth had a much closer encounter with an alien object in 2014. …

Harvard University physicist Daniel Jafferis and colleagues have shown that wormholes — theoretical portals through space-time that could create shortcuts for long journeys across the Universe — can exist. Wormholes are predicted by the theory of general relativity. Digital art by Les Bossinas, Cortez III Service Corp., 1998. “But don’t …

A cometary building block has been discovered inside the LaPaz Icefield (LAP) 02342, a carbonaceous chondrite meteorite found in Antarctica in the 2000s. An illustration showing how a sliver of cometary building block material was swallowed by an asteroid and preserved inside a meteorite. Image credit: Larry Nittler / NASA. …

Radar data from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft have revealed that small lakes in the northern hemisphere of Saturn’s hazy moon Titan are surprisingly deep (approximately 330 feet, or 100 m), perched atop hills and filled with methane. The findings, reported in two papers in the journal Nature Astronomy, also provide new …

A team of archaeologists from the United States and Europe has revealed the first example of Paleolithic figurative cave art found in the Balkan region. Figurative paintings in Romualdova Pećina, Croatia: bison (1), ibex (2) and anthropomorphic figures (3). Image credit: Aitor Ruiz-Redondo. “The importance of this discovery is remarkable …

Several footprints and exquisitely-preserved skin impressions made by a small theropod dinosaur approximately 120 million years ago (Aptian age of the Early Cretaceous epoch) have been found in the Jinju City area in Korea. Four-track Minisauripus trackway. Image credit: Kim et al, doi: 10.1038/s41598-019-38633-4. The Jinju footprints, assigned to the …

  It is not a matter of if but when a dangerously large asteroid ends up on a collision course for Earth, and NASA wants to be ready. The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) has been in development for several years, and now it’s got a real launch date with …

  The newly released image of a black hole (below) is a watershed moment for physics. Finally, we can put some of Einstein’s most famous predictions from a century ago to the test, but it was not as easy as pointing a big lens at the M87 galaxy and pressing …

An international team of paleontologists has found the remains of an extinct sea cucumber in 430 million-year-old (Silurian period) fossil-rich deposits in Herefordshire, the United Kingdom. Reconstruction of Sollasina cthulhu. Image credit: Elissa Martin, Division of Invertebrate Paleontology, Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. The researchers named the new species …

  One of the keys to scanning the red planet for present or past life is understanding the molecules that make up its thin atmosphere. Various missions have detected methane on Mars, considered to be one of the hallmarks of living organisms. The arrival of the ExoMars mission with its …