NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has captured stunning images of almost perfectly round sand dunes on the surface of the Red Planet. While sand dunes of all shapes and sizes are common on Mars, circular dunes like these are a rare sight. The dunes appear as slightly asymmetrical splodges in the picture, which was taken … Read more
There’s a floating garbage dump orbiting Earth, and it’s getting fuller every year. Space debris — known colloquially as space junk — is the name that scientists give to the thousands of pieces of broken satellites and spacecraft that clog Earth’s orbit. Space junk can be as small as a paint fleck or as large … Read more
Glimpsed only occasionally at the hearts of massive clusters of galaxies, ultramassive black holes are some of the largest and most elusive objects in the universe. These black hole behemoths have masses exceeding that of 10 billion suns, making them far more monstrous than even the supermassive black holes found at the centers of galaxies … Read more
Astronomers studying a remote baby star have found a “missing link” that could finally explain the origins of water on Earth, a new study suggests. By training a powerful radio telescope at V883 Orionis, a protostar 1,300 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Orion, astronomers have spotted gaseous water with a chemical composition close … Read more
Scientists studying a cousin of the bacteria responsible for tuberculosis and leprosy have discovered an enzyme that converts hydrogen into electricity, and they think it could be used to create a new, clean source of energy literally from thin air. The enzyme, which has been named Huc, is used by the bacterium Mycobacterium smegmatis to … Read more
The shredded remnants of the first supernova ever recorded by humans — which appeared in the sky more than 1,800 years ago and vanished within eight months — rise from the cosmic grave in a stunning new image from the National Science Foundation’s NOIRLab. Tinged blood red and swirling around an invisible center of mass, … Read more
For the first time, astronomers have spotted enormous, galaxy-scale shock waves rattling the “cosmic web” that connects nearly all known galaxies. These cosmic waves could reveal clues about how the largest objects in the universe were sculpted. The discovery was made by stitching and stacking thousands of radio telescope images together, which revealed the soft … Read more
The Vikings explored, raided and traded across a vast area stretching from North America to the Middle East between roughly the late eighth and mid-11th centuries. In Old Norse, the language the Vikings spoke, “a Viking was a sea-borne raider, and to go-a-viking was to undertake sea-borne raiding,” Angus Somerville and Russell Andrew McDonald, both … Read more
The largest animal ever to walk on Earth was likely the dinosaur Argentinosaurus, a hulking 77-ton (70 metric tons) titanosaur that lived about 90 million years ago during the Late Cretaceous. For comparison, the heaviest animal on land today is the African elephant (Loxodonta), which weighs less than 7 tons (6 metric tons). And both … Read more
A sea creature mentioned in 13th-century Old Norse manuscripts, which historians thought was a kraken-like mythological monster, is actually a whale using a hunting strategy known as trap or tread-water feeding, a new study finds. Scientists only described this feeding behavior around a decade ago, after they spotted humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) and Bryde’s whales … Read more
