Science

Researchers have found that a species of wee venomless orb weaver known as Philoponella prominens uses a truly unique strategy to prevent marital disharmony. After mating, the males bounce. Literally. P. prominens is a “social” spider. Social spiders live in communal webs that house up to 300 residents. They cooperate …

  There is no longer any doubt that the universe is teeming with planets — NASA recently announced that the total number of known exoplanets has crossed 5,000, and we’ve only just begun our search of the heavens. Upcoming projects leveraging the shiny new James Webb Space Telescope will certainly …

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has set innumerable records during its three decades of service, but the latest might be its most impressive feat yet. Researchers from Johns Hopkins University and the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) used Hubble to spot the most distant star ever, a whopping 12.8 billion light …

SpaceX is the only entity with the capability to fly astronauts to and from the International Space Station (ISS), but it’s wrapping up production of the vessel that makes it possible. Following a Reuters report, Elon Musk’s spaceflight company has confirmed that it will cap its fleet of Crew Dragon …

You might think our local gas giants are extreme — Jupiter with its gaggle of moons, and Saturn with the iconic rings, but they’re nothing compared to WASP-121b. This exoplanet caught the attention of astronomers a few years back when they realized its atmosphere was hot enough to bleed metal. …

Scientists have long believed there are “rogue black holes” wandering the universe, but we’ve never had good evidence of one until now. An international team of astronomers has released a study pointing to what appears to be the first roaming black hole, reports Space.com. It was no simple feat to …

For the first time in human history, scientists have watched a core-collapse supernova from beginning to end, in real time. The progenitor star was a red supergiant of about ten solar masses, some 120 million light-years away. In its final months, the dying star’s brightness flared dramatically as it cast …

In the last few decades, astronomers have slowly but surely added to the number of known exoplanets. Even the largest planets can be hard to spot, though, and moons are even smaller. Well, usually. A team working with data from the dearly departed Kepler space telescope has reported a possible …

The Perseverance rover has already made history by collecting the first-ever rock cores on another planet, but NASA says a pebble problem has delayed operations. The rover’s advanced sample collection mechanism has become obstructed by some debris, and the team doesn’t want to continue until it can get the rocks …

Like many people, I grew up in a solar system of nine planets. It’s the same solar system we live in now, of course, but the definition of a “planet” changed in 2006 to exclude poor little Pluto and its frosty kin. That was before we’d even seen the little …