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Explanation: Whatdunit? What disappeared while crossing a partially eclipsed Sun? Let’s present the evidence. The 24 frames-per-second video was taken in Spain (40°34'30.3"N 1°12'28.8"W) at 20:28 local time on August 12, 2026. The Perseids meteor shower was at its peak during this time. Is this a meteor? Meteor showers trace back to a region of the sky called a radiant point that corresponds to where the Earth is crossing a comet’s path. The object’s path might trace back to the Perseids’ radiant point in the Perseus constellation. The object trails a smaller angle on the sky than the 0.5 degree...

Explanation: This was a good year for the Perseids meteor shower. A key reason was the Moon was absent from lighting up Earth's night sky so that more meteors were visible than usual. Where was the Moon? It was busy visiting the Sun. Near the Perseids peak, the Moon moved directly in front of the Sun and created a total solar eclipse visible from Greenland and Spain. The Perseids occur when the Earth collides with a stream of Sun-orbiting debris cast off by Comet Swift-Tuttle. Perseid meteors, although typically only the size of a sand grain, tend to be fast...

Japanese scientists are readying a mission to Mars' moons to retrieve samples that may unlock the origins of the Solar System and life on Earth, although a rival Chinese mission aims to make it back first. The unmanned Martian Moons eXploration (MMX), set to blast off from Tanegashima Space Center in the coming months, could also lay the groundwork for humans visiting the red planet. The spacecraft, revealed to media last Thursday, will stay in Mars' orbit for around three years and will attempt to land on Phobos. It will collect at least 10 grams (0.35 ounces) of material from...

At Kimmeridge Bay [Dorset, UK] on the Jurassic Coast, the rocks have a bit of a pattern to them. And there's a good reason for that! It's a record of changes in Earth’s climate that were driven by something happening far beyond Dorset: the changing geometry of Earth’s orbit around the Sun... Because Earth's orbit changes over time in cycles! Welcome to Milancovich cycles! This is far from the only rock unit that shows this, and in fact the Blue Lias around Lyme Regis is also pretty famous for this, but I found this cool paper that really investigated it...

Explanation: This total solar eclipse appeared not only poetically beautiful but scientifically interesting. Usually the solar corona appears white, and to some observers the corona of last week's total solar eclipse did appear this pearly color. But this time, totality observers in Spain saw a corona that appeared unusually golden. For one reason, from Spain, the totality occurred when the setting Sun was near the horizon. That low, sunlight travels through a large amount of air which scatters out blue light. An unusual amount of smoke in the air from nearby forest fires acted as a second filter, further scattering...

Explanation: The Milky Way was not created by an evaporating lake. The colorful pool of water, about 10 meters across, is known as Silex Spring and is located in Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, USA. Illuminated artificially, the colors are caused by layers of bacteria that grow in the hot spring. Steam rises off the spring, heated by underground magma associated with the Yellowstone Hotspot. Unrelated and far in the distance, the central band of our Milky Way Galaxy arches high overhead, a band lit by billions of stars. The picture features a 16-image panorama taken in 2014. If the...

A clever swap has extended the historic Voyager 2’s mission in interstellar space. Engineers are hoping to do the same for Voyager 1. An ambitious effort to boost an aging probe on its journey through the uncharted territory of interstellar space seems to have found success. Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, have spent the last few months implementing what they nicknamed the “Big Bang” fix to buy the historic Voyager 2 spacecraft more time to continue its science mission. Voyager 2 is roughly 21.35 billion kilometers (13 billion miles) away from Earth, while its twin, Voyager...

This artist’s concept shows the red supergiant star Betelgeuse and a companion star orbiting within the supergiant’s tenuous outer atmosphere. Artwork: NASA, ESA, Elizabeth Wheatley (STScI); Science: Andrea Dupree (CfA) Betelgeuse has always been something of a mystery. And by “mystery,” I mean a source of endless fun, fascination and frustration for astronomers. Betelgeuse is one of the brightest stars in the sky, marking the right shoulder of the constellation Orion. It’s a red supergiant, a massive star with more than a dozen times the sun’s heft, that’s blasting out many tens of thousands as much light as our own...

At the quantum scale, tiny particles behave in bizarre ways. One reason for this is the uncertainty principle, which says that the more you know about where a quantum particle is, the less you can know about how fast it’s moving, and vice versa. The new uncertainty principle relates to fractals, shapes that remain equally complex no matter how much you zoom in on them. Around a decade ago, Semyon Dyatlov was studying whether quantum particles behave differently than ordinary particles when put into the same chaotic situations. Sometimes, an object moving chaotically can become trapped into following a fractal-like...

Explanation: Known for its bright and fast meteors, the annual Perseid Meteor Shower comes to planet Earth's skies from a radiant in the heroic constellation Perseus. The popular northern summer celestial spectacle is created as grains of dust cast off along the orbit of periodic comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle vaporize in Earth's dense atmosphere, tracing brief, but beautiful streaks through the night. Taken near the shower's peak of activity on August 12, this composite image recorded two bright perseid meteors and one meteor's watery reflection from a location near the coastal village of Grisslehamn, Sweden. Almost as bright as Altair, brightest star...

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is a major astronomical facility located on Cerro Pachón in Chile, jointly funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy. It is named after astronomer Vera Rubin, who provided the first convincing evidence for the existence of dark matter. Key operational milestones include:First Light: Achieved in June 2025, with the release of the first images revealing billions of stars, galaxies, and thousands of previously unseen asteroids. Full Survey Operations: The Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) officially began in July 2026 and will run for ten years. The observatory features...

Dazzling new images taken by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope show an astronomical object known for its striking resemblance to a lion’s face. NGC 2392, more commonly called the Lion Nebula, received its nickname from its hazy dust “mane” and the dying star at its center, which resembles a “button nose,” according to NASA. The images were taken by Webb, using its Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI). NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI; Image Processing: Alyssa Pagan (STScI) The agency previously captured images of the feline-themed planetary nebula in 2000 using the Hubble Space Telescope. Webb’s higher-resolution images show that...

Explanation: On August 12, the Moon's shadow reached out to touch our fair planet. Beginning in the Arctic Ocean, it swept along a narrow track that led the dark lunar umbra across parts of Greenland, Iceland, the Atlantic, Portugal, and northern Spain. And for a moment, denizens of Earth who found themselves with clear skies under the shadow of the Moon could witness a total solar eclipse. After dodging the weather by sea and making a landing along Rype Fjord on the Greenland east coast (at 71.07055N, 27.71252W), this hard-won snapshot was captured at 17:33:26 UTC. That's near the initial...

Explanation: On August 12th, 2026, the Moon totally eclipsed the Sun and cast its shadow across Siberia, Greenland, Iceland, Spain, and Portugal. Today’s image features two total solar eclipses viewed from Zaragoza, Spain, one over the Cathedral-Basilica of Our Lady of the Pillar and the other reflecting in the Ebro River. For a few moments, Spain saw its first major total solar eclipse since 1905. Those witnessing totality may experience a chill in the air, the quieting of birds, the confused chirps of insects, and the shared awe of many. It’s the corona’s time to shine as the Sun’s bright...

Explanation: It looks like a view from the Little Prince's planet. The featured image is a throwback to the 2024 Perseid meteor shower, surrounded in this projection by the Bieszczady Mountains in Poland. Visible in the sky is the arch of the Milky Way, along with several nebulas in red and over a hundred meteors pointing to the radiant. The Perseids are easily visible and quite popular in the Northern Hemisphere summer. (Watching meteor showers in the winter is less convenient for a good reason). This year they are expected to offer an even more dazzling spectacle than usual, because...

Explanation: How many moons does Saturn have? While the total will likely continue to grow, as of June 2026 the ringed gas giant had 293 confirmed moons. That's easily more than any other planet of the Solar System, including ruling gas giant Jupiter with a mere 115 confirmed moons. Most of Saturn's known moons are small, irregular satellites. Many are only few kilometers to a fraction of a kilometer across and grouped in tilted outer orbits. Six of its largest satellites can be seen here, though, in this sharp telescopic Saturnian family portrait taken on August 5. Larger than Earth's...

Explanation: Each of these pairs of galaxies is different. The two galaxies at the top are likely not interacting, at least presently. However, the top galaxy with the blue stripe, NGC 4650A, is a polar ring galaxy and may be the result of a past galaxy collision. The two galaxies in the middle of the featured image appear like they could be interacting gravitationally -- but their relative speeds make this unlikely. Of these two, the larger galaxy, NGC 4650, is a spiral galaxy with a bright bar of stars across its center. The two galaxies at the bottom are...

Explanation: Have you contemplated your home star recently? Featured here, a Sun partially eclipsed on the top left by the Moon is also seen eclipsed by earthlings contemplating the eclipse below. This spectacular menagerie of silhouettes was taken in 2012 from the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area near Page, Arizona, USA, where park rangers and astronomers expounded on the unusual event to interested gatherers. Also, faintly visible on the Sun's disk, just to the lower right of the dark Moon's disk, is a group of sunspots. A new solar eclipse will occur this week and give many people in northern...

Project Hail Mary is my favourite movie of the year, and while many people have made videos explaining time dilation due to travelling close to the speed of light, nobody has tried to visualise how the universe appears to warp due to relativistic aberration. I wanted to create these visuals to give you an idea of what it would look like at these speeds, even without a warp drive or hyperspace nothing looks right. Travelling At 99% of The Speed Of Light Looks Strange - Project Hail Mary's Space Warp | 11:09 Scott Manley | 1.87M subscribers | 168,417 views...

Explanation: Which of these is not a comet? You guessed it - the one on the right is a globular star cluster. The diffuse greenish coma of periodic comet 10P/Tempel 2 is at left in the frame. In fact the globular star cluster is Messier 30, also known as M30, or the 30th entry in astronomer Charles Messier's catalog of things which are not comets. The well-known 18th century astronomer kept a list of objects he observed, now his famous Messier Catalogue of Nebulae and Star Clusters, which did not move from night to night against the background stars and...