Hubble has found a growing ten-sided atmospheric wave around Saturn’s south pole—the first large regular-sided jet seen there. Saturn has long been known for a strange shape in its clouds. A vast hexagon circles the planet’s north pole, holding its form for more than four decades. Now astronomers have found something that looks as if […]

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Imagine turning a piece of ancient wood toward the light and finding the faint remains of someone’s handwriting. What did that person need to say? And how could we place their message on a calendar almost two thousand years later? Ancient inscriptions bring those questions together. Their words can preserve a royal decree, a business […]

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Twenty-seven faint objects beyond Neptune are giving astronomers a rare look at the planet-building material that survived when the outer solar system stopped growing. The outer solar system is not empty. Beyond Neptune, in the cold region known as the Kuiper Belt, countless small bodies travel around the Sun. Most are so faint that even […]

The post Hubble and Webb Found Tiny Worlds That Still Remember How the Solar System Formed appeared first on Curiosmos.

The objects are unusually soft in X-rays but bright in extreme ultraviolet light—exactly the combination that makes them difficult to find and potentially important to the history of stars and galaxies. A galaxy can be full of powerful objects and still keep some of them hidden in plain sight. That is what makes a new […]

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A terrace project in Rebild uncovered about 18.5 kilograms of Viking-Age silver. The objects show how wealth moved, was measured and was hidden in tenth-century Denmark. A new terrace was supposed to change a garden. Instead, a few minutes of digging opened a small window onto the Viking Age. In Rebild, northern Denmark, a homeowner […]

The post Denmark’s Largest Viking Silver Hoard Was Found in a Backyard appeared first on Curiosmos.

The name that keeps pulling archaeologists back to the eastern frontier What if a city that appears in the records of ancient Egypt has been sitting in plain sight, hidden beneath later roads, barracks and stonework? That is the possibility raised by a new discovery at Tell Abu Seifi in northern Sinai. Archaeologists have found […]

The post Did Archaeologists Find Egypt’s Lost City of Mesen? A Ramesses II Inscription Offers a New Clue appeared first on Curiosmos.

Look into the middle of N44 and the most striking feature is what seems to be missing. A vast opening interrupts the glowing gas, while stars crowd the surrounding scene. What could carve a cavity this large—and what happens to the material pushed out of the way? A Hubble image released by NASA on September […]

The post Hubble Reveals a 210-Light-Year Cavity Where Stars Are Reshaping Their Neighborhood appeared first on Curiosmos.

What might happen when the ingredients of life have an entire landscape in which to react? On Titan, NASA hopes to investigate that question by flying from one patch of ground to another. The Dragonfly rotorcraft is taking shape at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland. In a September 2 mission update, NASA […]

The post Dragonfly’s Titan Destination Has a Name—and a Question About Life’s Ingredients appeared first on Curiosmos.

Dig into an old settlement in the Amazon and the ground itself can reveal that people lived there. Beneath the vegetation, patches of dark soil contain charcoal, broken pottery and the remains of everyday meals. The houses may have disappeared. The soil they helped create can still support crops. Known as terra preta, or Amazonian […]

The post Terra Preta: The Ancient Amazonian Soil That Stayed Fertile for Centuries appeared first on Curiosmos.

Imagine finding a Roman coin hundreds of miles from the place where it was made. Who carried it there? A soldier, a merchant, or someone whose journey has left no other trace? One coin leaves those questions open. Put thousands of recorded finds on a map, however, and a different story begins to emerge: the […]

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What would a melon served in medieval China have looked like? Two seeds recovered from an ancient port are helping researchers approach that question through the fruit’s DNA. A new PNAS study, published September 4, places the seeds within an East Asian cultivated melon lineage. Their genetic traits suggest fruit suited to fresh eating or […]

The post Two Ancient Melon Seeds Offer a Glimpse of Fruit on Song Dynasty Tables appeared first on Curiosmos.

Look up at the night sky and it is easy to imagine a few bright worlds hanging in an empty blackness. But what are we really looking at when we say “the Solar System”? It is a family shaped by one star’s gravity, built from the same ancient disk of gas and dust, and still […]

The post What Is the Solar System? How Our Cosmic Neighborhood Took Shape appeared first on Curiosmos.

A faded painting may look almost indistinguishable from the rock beneath it while a photograph still records small color differences. Digital enhancement can amplify those differences, making an outline or patch of pigment easier to inspect. The vivid result is useful evidence about the image, but it is not a restored view of what an […]

The post How Image Enhancement Reveals Faded Rock Art—and What It Cannot Recover appeared first on Curiosmos.

A brilliant X-ray source is not automatically a black hole. Matter falling toward a neutron star can also become intensely luminous, and some neutron stars have surprised astronomers by producing far more radiation than expected. Identifying the object requires evidence about its mass, its rotation and whether incoming gas encounters a material surface. The distinction […]

The post Neutron Star or Black Hole? The Signals Astronomers Use to Tell Them Apart appeared first on Curiosmos.

A stone can be millions of years older than the monument built from it. Measuring when its minerals formed therefore cannot, on its own, reveal when people dragged it into place. To date a stone circle, archaeologists usually reconstruct the building event from the deposits and objects associated with it. That task involves several different […]

The post How Archaeologists Date a Stone Circle When the Stones Are Millions of Years Old appeared first on Curiosmos.

Venus can reach its greatest brilliance while a telescope shows only a crescent. A nearly full Venus exposes more of its sunlit hemisphere, yet that does not necessarily deliver more light to Earth. The missing part of the explanation is distance: a closer crescent can look much larger than a distant, almost fully illuminated disk. […]

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Saturn’s south pole has a ten-sided atmospheric wave, giving astronomers a new counterpart to the planet’s famous northern hexagon. The southern pattern appears to be evolving, raising a question that a single striking image cannot answer: will it become another enduring feature of the planet’s weather? A study announced on September 2 traces the feature […]

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Twenty-seven faint objects beyond Neptune have emerged from a deep James Webb Space Telescope survey, extending the search for the solar system’s building blocks to worlds only kilometres across. Hubble observations of part of the sample add a second clue: their colors resemble those of larger objects, suggesting that size alone has not erased the […]

The post Webb Finds 27 Tiny Worlds Beyond Neptune. Their Colors Hold a Clue to the Solar System’s Past appeared first on Curiosmos.

Prehistoric builders moved the enormous stones of the Devil’s Arrows at least 18 kilometres across Yorkshire, according to new research that identifies where the blocks came from. The finding connects Britain’s tallest surviving prehistoric stone row with Brimham Rocks, rather than closer sandstone outcrops. The study, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society A, traces […]

The post Britain’s Tallest Stone Row Was Built With 25-Tonne Blocks Hauled 11 Miles appeared first on Curiosmos.

Dark energy is one of the least satisfying names in astronomy because it sounds more specific than it is. Scientists did not discover a glowing substance called dark energy. They gave that name to the unknown influence associated with the accelerating expansion of the universe. The evidence is strong that the expansion is speeding up […]

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