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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, $\Lambda$).

Radio jets usually belong to massive elliptical galaxies. But astronomers have found a rare exception: "Araish," a beautiful spiral galaxy hiding a powerful secret. DRAGNs (Double Radio-Source Associated with Galactic Nuclei) are typically elliptical galaxies powered by supermassive black holes. Finding one inside a spiral galaxy is incredibly rare.

Hidden behind curtains of cosmic dust, a population of ancient galaxies has finally been revealed. They challenge our understanding of how the universe grew up. A team of 48 astronomers has discovered 70 faint, dusty galaxies that formed just 1 billion years after the Big Bang. These galaxies were invisible to optical telescopes like Hubble because they are shrouded in thick clouds of dust.

New data from the Perseverance rover challenges the "Cold & Icy" theory, suggesting ancient Mars was drenched in persistent heavy rainfall for millions of years. Mars today is a frozen desert. But 4 billion years ago, during the Noachian Epoch, it was a very different world. Evidence of river valleys and lake beds is undeniable, but the climate that created them is hotly debated.