The moon of Jupiter Io, the solar system’s most volcanic body, has been in turmoil for at least 4.57 billion years, since its birth and the sun’s infancy. These are the findings of a team of scientists studying Io with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to track sulfur and chlorine in the atmosphere of… Read More »
Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news about fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more. The massive heart-shaped feature on Pluto’s surface has intrigued astronomers since NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft photographed it in 2015. Now researchers think they’ve solved the mystery of how the distinctive heart came to be, and… Read More »
Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news about fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more. Archaeologists recently discovered the charred bones of at least four adults, possibly of royal descent, in an ancient Mayan temple pyramid in Guatemala. The cremation signaled a deliberate and potentially public desecration of his remains,… Read More »
Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have made the surprising discovery of methane emissions from a brown dwarf, or “failed star.” The finding suggests that the brown dwarf has auroras and may even be orbited by an undiscovered exomoon, the researchers said. The JWST brown dwarf discovery is surprising because these cold, isolated… Read More »
Saying goodbye is never easy, especially from a distant world. The Ingenuity Mars helicopter team met one last time on Tuesday, April 16, to inspect transmissions from the small rotorcraft, the first robot to explore the skies of a non-Earth world. The meeting, held in a control room at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in… Read More »
Earlier this year, researchers discovered a vast liquid ocean lurking beneath the icy crust of Saturn’s tiny moon Mimas. Now the same team may have discovered how it was created. New research suggests that Mimas’ icy crust is melting and thinning as its orbit around Saturn becomes less flat, or less “eccentric,” due to the… Read More »
Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news about fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more. A massive jawbone found by a father-daughter duo collecting fossils on a beach in Somerset, off the coast of England, belonged to a newly discovered species that is likely the largest marine reptile known to… Read More »
If all reports of mysterious objects whizzing through our skies are taken as actual encounters, Earth appears to be under attack. But spoiler alert: For the lead leader SET At the Institute, which was established to research and understand life beyond Earth, there is a need to take a step back and embrace the cosmic… Read More »
Editor’s Note: Jaime M. Yassif, Ph.D., is vice president of Global Biological Policy and Programs at the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a nonprofit global security organization focused on reducing nuclear and biological threats that endanger humanity. The opinions expressed in this comment are his own. To read more views on CNN. The headlines are alarming: “Highly… Read More »
Climate change will reduce future global income by about 19% over the next 25 years compared to a fictional world without warming, with the poorest regions and those least responsible for warming the atmosphere taking the biggest monetary hit, a new study has found. The economic impact of climate change in terms of how much… Read More »