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Water and oil don't mix. Like dissolves like. That's what chemistry class teaches us — but on Saturn's moon Titan, at roughly 94 kelvin (about -179°C), the rule breaks down. Benzene and ethane team up to form a 'cocrystal,' a mineral that doesn't exist anywhere on Earth.
JAXA's MMX mission launches in fiscal year 2026 to land on Phobos, Mars's larger moon, and scoop up soil samples. Is this 22-km-wide moon a captured asteroid or a chunk of Mars itself? Isotopes in the returned dust will settle the debate. SORABUMI explains humanity's first sample-return mission from the Mars system.
China's Chang'e-6 mission brought back 1.935 grams of sand from the Moon's far side, and it turned out to carry solar wind particles buried deeper than in near-side samples. Earth's magnetic field, it seems, was slowing the wind from 400 km/s to 200 km/s before it ever reached the near side. SORABUMI explains why the same Moon has two very different sunburn histories.
The impactor that wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago vaporized on contact — no fragment of it survives today. Yet nickel isotopes buried in a thin clay layer found across the globe reveal what it was: a rare carbon-rich 'CO chondrite,' born in the cold reaches beyond Jupiter. SORABUMI breaks down the science.
About 25 light-years from Earth, the Sun's ninth-closest white dwarf -- the burnt-out core of a dead star -- went unnoticed for 27 years, drowned in the glare of a red dwarf next door. Hubble's ultraviolet vision finally exposed four hidden dead stars within 65 light-years of home. SORABUMI explains how.
How can we tell whether a rocky planet dozens of light-years away has an atmosphere? For a few hours, as the planet crosses in front of its star, starlight grazes its air and comes out with a few colors missing. SORABUMI explains how transit spectroscopy reads that 'color fingerprint,' and why the clue shrinks to the thickness of an apple peel once you're talking about an Earth-sized world.
Primordial black holes may have formed before the universe was even a second old. Unlike black holes born from dying stars, they could be lighter than the Sun. By 2026, gravitational-wave detectors had logged 390 events — but the one that would prove it still hasn't shown up. SORABUMI explains.
ESA's Comet Interceptor will launch before its target comet has even been discovered, parking in space to wait. A mothership and two probes will approach a comet that has never before neared the sun, or possibly an interstellar visitor, from multiple directions at once. SORABUMI explains this unusual mission.
Astronomers just found a third planet, d, orbiting Beta Pictoris through direct imaging. But when they went back through old archives, it turned out the planet had already been photographed more than 11 years earlier. SORABUMI explains how a world 100 times fainter than its neighbor slipped past notice for so long.
JWST found a bar structure roughly 4.5 kpc (about 15,000 light-years) long in a galaxy at redshift z=5.102, seen just 1.2 billion years after the Big Bang. A well-formed bar is a sign of a mature galaxy — and this one grew up faster than expected. SORABUMI explains.
SORABUMI explains the strange journey of BepiColombo, the Mercury probe that needs eight years and nine flybys to reach a planet right next door to Earth. The real challenge isn't distance — it's the Sun's gravity pulling the spacecraft in too fast.
We picture black holes as cosmic vacuum cleaners, but the real problem is starvation: food has to come to them. JWST peered into the central 2,000 light-years (618 parsecs) of NGC 4696 and, for the first time, caught 100-million-degree gas condensing into threads that feed a rotating disk — a self-sustaining feeding loop.
Launched in 2004 at 600 km, NASA's Swift Observatory has sunk to about 400 km as atmospheric drag drags it down. Left alone, it would burn up on reentry by late 2026. Instead, a robotic servicer called LINK is being sent to grab it and push it back up — an unprecedented rescue. SORABUMI explains.
In 2026, JWST confirmed that the galaxy cluster XLSSC 122, some 10.4 billion light-years away, is producing powerful gravitational lensing. SORABUMI explains how a foreground cluster's gravity bends and magnifies light from behind it, and why this densely packed cluster shouldn't have existed so soon.
Earth has more than just the Moon tagging along. A small rock called Kamo'oalewa circles the Sun in almost the same year-long orbit, staying close without ever being caught by Earth's gravity. SORABUMI breaks down this strange, in-between relationship in everyday terms.
Cosmic dust is the raw material of planets and our own bodies. In Sextans A, a primitive dwarf galaxy with just 3-7% of the Sun's heavy elements, JWST spotted stars making dust out of almost nothing but iron. SORABUMI unpacks the surprising answer to how the early universe managed to make dust at all.
GJ 3378 b, a super-Earth found 25 light-years away, sits right in the middle of its habitable zone, soaking up about 90% as much starlight as Earth gets from the Sun. But the real test for finding life isn't distance — it's whether a planet can hold onto its atmosphere. SORABUMI explains the new yardstick astronomers call the cosmic shoreline.
Instead of flying Mars samples straight to Earth, why not quarantine them on the Moon first? That's the proposal published in a scientific journal in June 2026. SORABUMI traces the idea back through Apollo's isolation protocols and Hayabusa's homecoming to explain why the Moon suddenly looks like the ideal front porch.
FRB 220529A is a repeating fast radio burst flashing from 2.5 billion light-years away. After 17 months of watching with China's giant FAST telescope, researchers caught a moment when the radio wave's 'twist' spiked a hundredfold -- evidence, they believe, of a solar storm from a companion star. SORABUMI explains.
JWST tracked the scorching gas giant WASP-121b for a full orbit and found something strange: the escaping atmosphere trails behind the planet, but also stretches out ahead of it. SORABUMI breaks down what a complete-orbit observation of atmospheric loss, 858 light-years away, actually revealed.
GWTC-5.0, the gravitational-wave catalog released in 2026, shows signs that some merged black holes went on to collide again, producing a 'second generation.' SORABUMI breaks down what happened 700 million and 2.4 billion light-years away, and how spin patterns exposed a hierarchy of mergers.
The closest photo of Japan's SLIM lander lying face-down on the Moon was taken by SORA-Q, an 80mm, 250-gram sphere built with transforming-toy technology from Takara Tomy. At roughly 1/4000th the weight of NASA's Mars rover Perseverance, why did such a small, simple design hold up so well in a brutal environment? SORABUMI explains.
JWST kept finding strange red dots in the early universe, dubbed 'Little Red Dots.' In June 2026, a spectrum of one such object, GLIMPSE-17775, revealed over 40 emission lines and 16 iron absorption lines — proof it isn't a galaxy at all, but a black hole wrapped in gas. From space media outlet SORABUMI.
In June 2026, scientists confirmed the first garnet ever found in a Martian rock, inside the meteorite NWA 8171. SORABUMI explains how a single crystal preserved a record of intense heat and pressure that no rover could ever reach.