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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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.

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 […]

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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.

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.