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 […]

The post Astronomers Found 84 Strange X-Ray Sources Hiding in Six Galaxies. What Are They? appeared first on Curiosmos.

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.