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Observations from Keck Observatory, JWST, and Hubble reveal that Uranus's two outermost rings have entirely different compositions — one shines blue with water ice, the other is reddish-brown with rock and organics. Why would rings around the same planet be so different?
The International Space Station is slated for retirement in the 2030s. What takes its place will be a new breed of orbital habitat — designed, built, and operated by private companies. Here's what the commercialization of low Earth orbit really means.
M-type dwarf stars — red dwarfs — make up more than 70% of all stars in the galaxy. They're small, long-lived, and surrounded by rocky planets. So why are they so hostile to life? SORABUMI breaks down the battle between stellar flares and planetary atmospheres.
How did Earth, Mars, and Jupiter come to exist? Starting from clouds of gas and dust, this explainer walks through the step-by-step process of planet formation — and what the explosion of exoplanet discoveries has taught us about just how many ways a planetary system can turn out.
Starting in 2026, Rubin Observatory photographs the entire southern sky every 3–4 days and fires off around 100,000 change alerts each night. For the first time, astronomers have a systematic record of everything that flickers, explodes, or moves when no one is watching. Here's what that means for astronomy.
When you look at a star's color, you're reading its temperature directly. Blue stars burn hot and die young; red stars simmer slowly for trillions of years. Here's how a star's color encodes its entire life story.
Every May, Earth plows through a trail of debris left by Halley's Comet. Here's why the Eta Aquariid meteor shower puts on a bigger show in the Southern Hemisphere — and exactly what's happening when those streaks light up the predawn sky.
What exactly is a rogue planet? This piece explores the strange class of worlds that belong to no star, drift freely through the Milky Way, and — as of January 2026 — can finally be measured for both mass and distance at the same time.
In spring 2026, a comet returned to the inner solar system and became faintly visible to the naked eye. Its last visit was 180,000 years ago, and it won't come back. Why do comets captivate us the way they do? Here's a look at how to observe one, and what these ancient wanderers actually are.
Uranus and Neptune are called 'ice giants,' but their interiors may host something stranger than ice: a superionic state where carbon stays locked in place while hydrogen alone flows in helical paths. This bizarre behavior could finally explain the planets' wildly tilted magnetic fields.
The hot gas envelope surrounding the Milky Way is roughly 12% warmer on the southern side. The culprit is a neighboring satellite galaxy whose gravity has been compressing our galaxy's outer halo for the past 100 million years.
Cygnus X-1 — humanity's first confirmed black hole — is firing a jet at half the speed of light. For the first time, astronomers have directly measured its power: the equivalent of 10,000 suns. Here's what 18 years of observations and a 'dancing jet' revealed.
In March 2025, ESA and JAXA announced deeper cooperation on Moon and Mars exploration. But 48 countries don't converge on the Moon just for the sake of peace. Cost, technology, and politics are the real drivers — here's how they actually work.
At the center of galaxy J1007+3540, a black hole that had been dormant for 100 million years suddenly fired up a new jet. Radio telescopes captured something rare: ancient fossil plasma and a fresh new outburst in the same frame. Why do black holes go quiet — and what makes them wake up?
JWST's observations of Epsilon Indi Ab, a giant planet just 12 light-years away, turned up something no one expected: water-ice clouds instead of the ammonia clouds theory had promised. Here's what that means for atmospheric models.
In 2015, humanity detected a ripple in spacetime for the first time. What are gravitational waves, how do we measure them, and what have we learned? A guide to the universe light couldn't show us.
NASA's Curiosity rover detected 21 organic molecules in a Martian rock — 7 of them never seen on Mars before. This isn't evidence of life. But the rock preserved a chemistry friendly to life for 3.5 billion years.
Multiple Mars spacecraft recorded the same solar storm simultaneously. Without a magnetosphere, Mars receives radiation doses many times higher than Earth. Here's why that's the biggest obstacle to sending humans there.
Every time ions streaming from the Sun collide with hydrogen atoms in space, they produce X-rays. The eROSITA telescope has, for the first time, successfully separated the solar system's own glow from deep-space signals. Here's how it works and why it matters.
Set to launch in 2026, NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope has a field of view roughly 100 times wider than Hubble's — wide enough to capture five full moons in a single frame. From the mystery of dark energy to thousands of new exoplanets, Roman is poised to rewrite observational astronomy from the ground up.
JWST has confirmed that more than 97% of GJ 9827d's atmosphere is water vapor. Neither a rocky planet nor a gas giant, this 'steam world' represents a genuinely new category in exoplanet science.
A shelf-like landform in Mars's northern hemisphere may be the strongest evidence yet that a vast ocean once covered a third of the planet. Where did all that water go — and what does it mean for the search for life?
Finding two quasars close together in the sky is a smoking gun for a massive galaxy merger. These discoveries let us look back to just 900 million years after the Big Bang — and they're rewriting how we understand the growth of galaxies.
GJ 9827 d, a planet 97 light-years from Earth, has an atmosphere composed almost entirely of water vapor. Neither rocky, icy, nor gaseous, it represents a fourth planetary category — one that has now been observationally confirmed for the first time.