6+ day, 12+ hour ago   (333+ words) MIT chemistry professor Mei Hong co-led the study with Professor of Planetary Sciences, Sara Seager, publishing their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Using nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy to track molecular structure in high resolution, Hong’s…...

1+ week, 19+ hour ago   (216+ words) Strangely enough, Mars’ moons Phobos and Deimos were discovered much later than the moons of far more distant gas giants like Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus. Yet, scientists have long debated the true origins of these pint-sized satellites. Unraveling their history…...

1+ week, 3+ day ago   (379+ words) Visible light shows a galaxy’s familiar framework of stars, dust, and gas clouds. X-rays, however, reveal gas heated to millions of degrees by supermassive black holes, exploding stars, and scorching stellar winds. When researchers combine Chandra’s high-energy X-ray data with…...

1+ week, 4+ day ago   (437+ words) Roman’s flagship planet-hunting technique, gravitational microlensing, harnesses Einstein’s general theory of relativity. When a foreground star passes precisely in front of a background star, the foreground star’s gravity acts as a natural magnifying glass, bending and amplifying the background light....

1+ week, 5+ day ago   (279+ words) NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) caught the first faint dips in light as TIDYE-1b crossed its star every 8.83 days. To confirm the signal against the background noise of a volatile young star, Barber’s team used a specialized algorithm named…...

1+ week, 6+ day ago   (535+ words) The Futura Team represents the pulse of Futura’s editorial department, bringing together a collective expertise dedicated to the dissemination of scientific knowledge. Rather than the work of a single author, every article published under this signature is the result of…...

2+ week, 3+ day ago   (506+ words) Recently, NASA’s Perseverance rover caught not one, but two rare astronomical events in the Martian sky: the transit of Phobos in front of the Sun and, more surprisingly, the occultation of Earth by this tiny Martian moon. Both events provide…...

2+ week, 4+ day ago   (326+ words) Of course, the story of the Chang’e 4 lunar lander comes to mind. For a few days, life did manage to spring up on the Moon—a cotton seed germinated onboard Chang’e 4, bringing a brief spark of life to that dusty…...

2+ week, 4+ day ago   (387+ words) The Futura Team represents the pulse of Futura’s editorial department, bringing together a collective expertise dedicated to the dissemination of scientific knowledge. Rather than the work of a single author, every article published under this signature is the result of…...

2+ week, 4+ day ago   (376+ words) Betelgeuse, a true celebrity in the constellation Orion, has been captivating stargazers forever (or at least since telescopes became a thing). Its enormous radius – about 700 times that of our Sun – makes it the nearest red supergiant to Earth, and at…...