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Why do so many icy objects at the edge of the solar system look like two spheres stuck together? A new supercomputer simulation has finally solved the mystery. In January 2019, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft flew past Arrokoth, an ancient, icy rock in the Kuiper Belt. To everyone's surprise, it looked exactly like a snowman. Even more surprising? It turns out about 10% of all planetesimals in the Kuiper Belt share this exact same "contact binary" shape.

An immensely powerful neutrino struck a deep-sea detector. Did it come from the evaporation of a primordial black hole near Earth? Neutrinos are often called "ghost particles" because they have almost no mass and rarely interact with matter. Trillions pass through your body every second. But recently, the KM3NeT collaboration—a massive telescope network submerged in the deep Mediterranean Sea—detected something extraordinary.

When an asteroid slammed into Earth 6.3 million years ago, it launched a spray of molten rock across South America. Today, researchers have finally found the fragments. Tektites are natural glasses formed under extreme conditions. When an extraterrestrial body strikes the Earth with immense energy, it melts the local rock and flings it into the atmosphere. The molten droplets cool rapidly as they plummet back to the surface, forming distinct, aerodynamic shapes.

How a decades-long mission to measure the delicate equilibrium between the Sun's incoming energy and Earth's outgoing heat revolutionized our understanding of climate.Attempts to understand Earth's radiation budget started around 1880, but the space age transformed everything. On Jan. 31, 1958, Explorer 1 became the first US satellite, carrying a cosmic ray detector to measure radiation. It was the first step in a long journey.

An international collaboration has published the most detailed radio sky map ever created, revealing 13.7 million cosmic sources hiding in the dark. When we look up at the night sky, we see light from stars. But if we tune our eyes to low-frequency radio waves, the universe looks dramatically different. The stars vanish, replaced by the violent, energetic remnants of dying stars and the immense, invisible jets fired by supermassive black holes.

Are galaxies held together by invisible Dark Matter, or is our understanding of gravity fundamentally flawed? Wide binary stars are finally providing the answer. In the outer edges of galaxies, stars orbit much faster than Newton's and Einstein's laws of gravity predict. To explain this "low-acceleration anomaly," scientists invented Dark Matter—a hypothetical, invisible halo providing extra gravitational pull.

Space junk burning up on re-entry isn't just disappearing. It's leaving a permanent, human-made chemical fingerprint high in Earth's pristine upper atmosphere. What goes up must come down. With approximately 14,000 active satellites in orbit and proposals for up to one million more, the sheer volume of spacecraft re-entering Earth's atmosphere is skyrocketing.

Deep in the early universe, 8.5 billion years ago, a galaxy is being torn apart. Its gas is stripping away in long, star-forming tentacles. Astrophysicists from the University of Waterloo have spotted the most distant "jellyfish galaxy" ever seen. Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), they peered into the COSMOS field—a patch of sky far from our own galaxy's dust.

As it cools, the Moon contracts, buckling its crust into ridges and scarps. A new study reveals these "wrinkles" are everywhere—and they might be dangerous. Unlike Earth, the Moon has no tectonic plates. It is a single-plate planet. Yet, it is seismically active. Why? Because it is shrinking.

In the shadows of a galaxy cluster, astronomers have found a phantom. A galaxy made of 99% dark matter, betraying its presence only by four tiny clusters of stars. Most galaxies shine bright. But CDG-2 is a "Low-Surface-Brightness" galaxy, so faint it's nearly invisible. It contains only a sparse scattering of stars.

Deep in the heart of a 13-billion-year-old cluster, astronomers found two dead stars dancing. One is visible. The other is a heavy, invisible ghost. NGC 6397 is one of the closest globular clusters to Earth. It's a crowded, chaotic place where old stars go to die.

New data suggests dark energy might be evolving over time. But one physicist argues the "new physics" might just be a calibration error in our cosmic rulers. Dark Energy is the mysterious force accelerating the expansion of the universe. For decades, we assumed it was a constant (the Cosmological Constant, $\Lambda$).