Science

ATLANTA — The moon goes by many names. August saw the full sturgeon moon while in March sky-gazers may have witnessed the blood moon, which occurs when the satellite appears to turn red during a lunar eclipse. You may have also heard of a blue moon, the second full moon to happen in one month. And then there is the …

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A monster galaxy from the early universe shows that the cosmos was rich with oxygen when it was only less than 3% of its present age, astronomers have found. The discovery raises questions about how early life could have first appeared in the universe. This isn’t the first time astronomers have looked at that enigmatic galaxy, named JADES-GS-z11-0. It was …

Blue Origin plans to launch its 35th New Shepard mission on Saturday (Aug. 23), and you can watch live. The commercial spaceflight company, which was founded by billionaire Jeff Bezos, will send its 200th payload above the Kármán line on this uncrewed suborbital flight, which will include experiments and research designed by students, teachers and university teams. The NS-35 flight …

Beneath the stable crust of North America, scientists have discovered something extraordinary: the deep roots of the continent are slowly dripping away in blobs of rock.  This unusual geologic process appears to be driven by the remnants of an ancient tectonic plate, revealing a rare opportunity to observe “cratonic thinning” as it happens in real time.  The phenomenon …

The moon is almost completely dark tonight, thanks to where we are in the lunar cycle. The lunar cycle is a series of eight unique phases of the moon’s visibility. The whole cycle takes about 29.5 days, according to NASA, and these different phases happen as the Sun lights up different parts of the moon whilst it orbits Earth.  So …

Birds are not merely descendants of dinosaurs — they are dinosaurs. For Yale evolutionary biologist and ornithologist Richard Prum, birds have been a lifelong passion and a window into some of evolution’s most intriguing mysteries. In a wide-ranging conversation with co-host Janna Levin, Prum traces the deep evolutionary origins of feathers, which he argues first emerged not for flight but …

When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. An X-ray jet blasts through wreckage surrounding a supernova. | Credit: NASA/Swift/Cruz deWilde Astronomers have used a newly discovered and still mysterious class of cosmic explosions to better understand the process of stellar life and death in the distant universe. The blasts in …

It is not every day that a nearby, cataloged galaxy reveals a secret hiding in plain sight. A new study reports a complete Einstein ring, a near perfect loop of light made when a more distant galaxy’s glow is bent and magnified by a massive foreground galaxy. The result arrives from Euclid’s early observations and centers on NGC 6505, a …

A team of international scientists has discovered new fossils at a field site in Africa that indicate Australopithecus, and the oldest specimens of Homo, coexisted at the same place in Africa at the same time — between 2.6 and 2.8 million years ago. The paleoanthropologists discovered a new species of Australopithecus that has never been found anywhere. The Ledi-Geraru Research …