It is one of those questions that sounds almost too simple to deserve a scientific explanation. Look up on a clear afternoon and the sky is blue. Yet that familiar color is the visible result of sunlight colliding with molecules thousands o...
Read article
Near the heart of the Milky Way lies a cloud with a reputation that sounds invented for a science-fiction cocktail menu. Sagittarius B2 contains alcohol. It also contains ethyl formate, an o...
Read
Few astronomical discoveries have produced a nickname as irresistible as the “diamond planet.” About 41 light-years away in the constellation Cancer, 55 Cancri e is a super-Earth nearly twic...
Read
Imagine putting the entire Solar System on a cosmic scale: the eight planets, every known moon, the asteroids, comets, dwarf planets, dust and the enormous Sun. The result would be absurdly...
Read
At this moment, Earth is moving in several different ways at once. It spins on its axis, circles the Sun at roughly 30 kilometers per second, and accompanies the entire Solar System on a vas...
Read
Space is a vacuum, so an astronaut cannot simply lift a visor and take a sniff. Yet crews returning from spacewalks have repeatedly described something remarkably close to a smell of space:...
Read
In the Chihuahuan Desert of northern Mexico, where Durango, Chihuahua and Coahuila approach one another across an immense dry basin, a patch of landscape has acquired one of the strangest re...
Read
For generations, chemistry books could place bismuth near the end of the periodic table's stable territory. Its naturally occurring isotope, bismuth-209, showed no detectable radioactive dec...
Read
In 1929, while scholars were cataloguing manuscripts in Istanbul's Topkapı Palace, they encountered a fragment of an extraordinary world map. Painted in vivid colors on parchment traditional...
Read
In 1901, divers working an ancient shipwreck near the Greek island of Antikythera recovered statues, ceramics, glass and a badly corroded mass of bronze. The wreck had carried valuable cargo...
Read