The powerful NSF Inouye Solar Telescope has just delivered absolutely mind-blowing observations of its first X-class solar flare. On 8 August 2024, the telescope managed to capture one of the most powerful flares our Sun is capable of producing – at a remarkable resolution of just four Earths across. This level of detail reveals some of the finest structures we’ve …
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The ambitious mission to retrieve samples from asteroid Bennu and return them to Earth is paying off. Just as scientists had hoped, the asteroid is revealing details about the early days in our Solar System. More than just a simple space rock, Bennu contains not only material from the Solar System, but material from beyond our system. Bennu follows an …
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The origin of the differing tilts in the orbits of the planets in our solar system may have been revealed through the discovery of subtle warps spotted in many planet-forming disks around young stars. A major observing program with ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array), called exoALMA, has surveyed 15 planet-forming, or protoplanetary, disks in detail. In particular, astronomers led by …
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The Inouye Solar Telescope captured this image of a solar flare on August 8, 2024. (Image credit: NSF/NSO/AURA, CC-BY) The world’s largest solar telescope just captured the highest-resolution images of a solar flare to date — and they’re spectacular. Researchers trained the Hawaii-based Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope on the final stages of a powerful X-class solar flare on Aug. …
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The Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope has been a game-changer. It has delivered some of the highest resolution views we have ever taken of the Sun. Now, it has provided the highest resolution observations of coronal loops during a solar flare. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content. …
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The smallest magnetic loops ever seen in the sun’s corona — imaged for the first time by the National Science Foundation’s Daniel F. Inouye Solar Telescope — could be the bottom floor of the machinery that powers the ferocious flares that routinely blast out from our star. “It’s a landmark moment in solar science,” said Cole Tamburri of the University …
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The near-Earth asteroid Bennu contains stardust that is older than our solar system, as well as organic materials and ices from interstellar space, three fresh studies of the asteroid’s sample materials show. Scientists all over the world have been poring over samples of Bennu ever since material from the asteroid was brought to Earth in 2023, courtesy of NASA‘s OSIRIS-REx …
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Mars’ Valles Marineris stretches nearly a quarter of the way around the planet’s equator. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona) QUICK FACTS What it is: Candor Chasma, a large canyon on Mars Where it is: Valles Marineris, the biggest canyon network in the solar system When it was shared: Aug. 14, 2025 Mars has a huge network of canyons that stretches …
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Witthaya Prasongsin | Moment | Getty Images President Donald Trump‘s attack on solar and wind projects threatens to raise energy prices for consumers and undermine a stretched electric grid that’s already straining to meet rapidly growing demand, renewable energy executives warn. Trump has long said wind power turbines are unattractive and endanger birds, and that solar installations take up too …
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Topline The new moon on Saturday, Aug. 23, will pass unseen. Lost in the sun’s glare, it will get closest to our star — from Earth’s point of view — at precisely 2:06 a.m. EDT. Lost in the sun’s glare, its absence from the night sky signals the end of one orbit of the Earth by the moon, and the …
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