Explore the Space section of The Pulse for science-driven coverage of astronomy, cosmic research and exploration missions.
Saturn has long kept one geometric secret at its north pole — a colossal six-sided storm that has puzzled scientists for decades. Now, Hubble has caught…
When Miguel Montargès saw the processed images, he jumped from his chair. For an astronomer who’d spent years chasing a ghost around one of the most…
Pulsar Timing Array (PTA) astronomers have spent years listening to a faint signal from across the universe. These signals do not appear to come from a…
12.5 billion light-years away, a galaxy existed before Earth, before our solar system, before almost everything we know — and deep inside it, three supermassive black…
Somewhere in the constellation Gemini, a glowing face stares back at us from space — two bright eyes, a wispy mane of hazy tails, and at…
On the afternoon of July 16, 2024, a sonic boom rattled the New York City area as a rock the size of a heavy airline bag…
There’s a galaxy 17 million light-years away that appears to stare back. Its defining feature — a dark, bruised ring encircling a brilliant core — has…
From the very first images James Webb returned, something was off. Tiny red dots kept appearing — in nearly every photo, across years of observations —…
When a massive star dies, its first announcement to the universe is almost impossible to catch. The core collapses, energy waves tear outward through layers of…
The shutters on a spacecraft window stay closed most of the time. You open them when there is a reason, and then you have a few seconds.…
Somewhere on a ridge in northern Spain, several thousand people are standing very still. They are all facing west, and the light is wrong. It is late…
Venus is scorching, cloud-smothered, and long dismissed as a world that stopped evolving billions of years ago — a geological relic suspended in time. Yet cutting…
A stellar explosion went off in the Milky Way in 2000 — and then, for over two decades, it went quiet behind a wall of dust.…
A dung beetle finds a fresh pile in the dark, cuts off a piece and rolls it into a ball. Then it turns around, puts its…
They are the most common type of planet in the Milky Way — nearly 3,300 confirmed, more than half of all known exoplanets — yet sub-Neptunes…
In 2019, a brief blue flash lit up routine optical survey data and quickly faded — just another transient event in a sky full of them.…
Forty-eight light years from Earth, a small rocky planet has been quietly holding onto something astronomers were not sure it could keep: an atmosphere. For the…
Somewhere on Mars, a small robot sits alone on an endless rust red plain. It has not moved in years, and it never will again. Its…
Astronomers pointing NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope at Beta Pictoris had a specific target in mind: a giant planet the scientific community had already catalogued and…
From high above Antarctica, a satellite was scanning a sheet of blinding white ice. Then it caught something that did not belong, a smear of brown…
For years, astronomers trained their telescopes on Sagittarius A* — the supermassive black hole at the Milky Way’s center, four million times the mass of the…
In 1604, astronomers and other people around the world witnessed a bright new star appear in the evening sky. Among those watching was German astronomer Johannes…
Every time you hold a compass, something invisible does the work. That same invisible force paints the northern lights across winter skies above Minnesota and Maine.…
Just before dawn tomorrow, an unusual sight will appear high above the eastern horizon. The Moon, Mars, and the bright star Aldebaran will play a starring…
Picture the International Space Station, then imagine three of them bolted together and dropped straight down into the dark. Now imagine them resting not in orbit, but on…
Stand at the edge of the sea and breathe in. That sharp, briny smell is not the salt, it is a gas made by life, breathed out…
It has been hanging in the night sky for as long as anyone can remember, the seventh planet from the Sun, bigger than you think and…
There are many mission plans for obtaining portions of Mars and Asteroids and returning those samples to Earth. Some researchers have been thinking about the final…
On the night of July 1, 2025, a survey telescope in Chile caught something crossing the sky at a speed that made no sense for our…
Scores of stars ringed in neon pink blaze against clouds of burnt-orange dust in a newly released NASA image — a portrait as strange as it…
Step outside on a clear night and look up. You already know what you will see, a scatter of stars, maybe a planet glowing steady above…
It was clearly a wild and untamed time when our solar system first came together. Large masses were moving in chaotic orbits and clashing together frequently.…
Picture a bird the size of a sparrow lifting off a hedgerow in rural Ohio on an October evening. It has no map, no compass, no…
On a July night in 2025, a telescope on a hillside in Chile did what it does every night without fail. It swept the sky, hunting…
The sun has just dropped below the horizon. The sky fades to deep blue, then indigo, and most people head inside. But in the northern United…
In the early universe, some galaxies grew to enormous size at breathtaking speed — then abruptly went dark, ceasing to form stars almost as fast as…
Picture the Moon on a clear night, hanging over your backyard. Now imagine a continuous belt of solar panels running all the way around its middle,…
Hold up your hand and look at it for a second. The iron in your blood, the calcium in your bones, the oxygen you are breathing…
A moon fragment found in the desert initially appeared no different from the many meteorites geologists recover from desert sands. This fact alone raises a bigger…
Every second, hypervelocity collisions may be blasting tiny flecks of Earth into space. Some of those grains, small enough to ride sunlight against gravity across the…
The extreme winds emitted from a black hole in space have raised interest among researchers studying its properties. The speeds produced are greater than anything ever…
Equipped with rock picks and hand lenses, a team of geoscientists recently converged on the Mojave Desert to investigate something most people would walk right past.…
Most people picture the Moon’s surface the way the first Apollo photographs showed it, a pale, powdery plain as soft as the talcum in a bathroom…
A new Hubble image of galaxy cluster MACS J1141.6-1905 looks almost impossibly crowded — dozens of galaxies in different shapes and sizes packed toward the center…
Four researchers at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland guide a small blue crane as it hoists a cylindrical device — silver and gold layers stacked…
Something is occurring in faraway space, drawing energy from an unknown source. It does not act like a normal explosion; this supernova is not fading but…
On a clear winter night last December, something rare was slipping past Earth through the dark. It had come from somewhere far beyond our solar system,…
When astronomers turned the James Webb Space Telescope onto a tiny red speck of ancient light — a source that existed just 1.8 billion years after…
Inside a Cleveland laboratory, two NASA researchers were running what should have been a routine test — heating simulated lunar dust inside a red-hot furnace to…
Picture a world squeezed into the shape of a lemon by forces so violent they would shred almost anything else in the universe. Its sky is…
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