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In the next 12 months, an annular and then a total solar eclipse will cross the U.S. Here’s where to see them. This distance-decay model shows how many people are estimated to travel to see the 2024 total solar eclipse. Scroll to the end of the article for a higher-resolution version of all maps. North America will experience two spectacular solar eclipses within a six-month span from Oct. 14, 2023, to April 8, 2024. The first is an annular eclipse whose central path treks across the western U.S. from Oregon to Texas before crossing Central America and northern South America.…

An astounding discovery in the Heaning Wood Bone Cave in northern England has revealed the oldest human remains found in the region, dating back 11,000 years. A team from the University of Central Lancashire ( UCLAN), uncovered evidence of human activity in the early Mesolithic period, shedding new light on the technologies and cultural habits of our ancestors. The Heaning Wood Bone Cave in Cumbria was first excavated in 1958 by E.G. Holland and this limestone formation with a vertical shaft has developed into a complex karstic fissure system. The cave was found to contain the preserved skeletal remains of three adults and…

The hypothetical world called Planet Nine is expected to be a super-Earth or sub-Neptune planet with an orbit that potentially takes it dozens of times farther from the Sun than the dwarf planet Pluto. Just over a year ago, a trio of astronomers set a record for the most distant object ever discovered in the solar system. Because the small world was found more than three times farther from the Sun than Pluto, the team fittingly dubbed it FarOut. But FarOut’s incredible distance of about 123 astronomical units — where 1 astronomical unit (AU) equals the average distance between the Sun…

The search for extraterrestrial life has been a topic of scientific inquiry and public fascination for decades. Scientists use various methods, such as studying other planets and moons in our own solar system, analyzing signals from distant stars, and searching for biosignatures in the atmosphere of exoplanets, to try to answer the question of whether we are alone in the universe. Despite ongoing searches and discoveries, the question of whether there is life beyond Earth remains one of the greatest mysteries of our time and continues to inspire and intrigue scientists and the general public alike. Deep learning techniques uncovered…

Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) have detected a rapidly growing supermassive black hole in COS-87259, a galaxy that forms stars at a rate 1,000 times that of our own Milky Way Galaxy and contains over a billion solar masses worth of interstellar dust. This Hubble image shows NGC 5033, a spiral galaxy with a bright and energetic core called an active galactic nucleus, which is powered by a supermassive black hole. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble / Judy Schmidt / ESA. Today, black holes with masses millions to billions of times greater than that of…

The supermassive black hole in our galaxy’s core is accompanied by a tight-knit group of stars — and we aren’t sure how they got there.  Awash in a torrent of lethal radiation, a comet strays near the center of the Milky Way. From this viewpoint, swirling tendrils of super-charged plasma spiral across the shrouded, powerful galactic core, a black hole known as Sagittarius A*, closely circled by careening stars. The Sun circles the hub of our Milky Way just as a planet circles a star. It orbits about 26,000 light-years from the center of our galaxy, on the Orion Spur…

A pre-Hispanic mummy of between 600 and 800 years old, was found inside the backpack of a delivery man from a delivery company in the Peruvian region of Puno, near Bolivia. The 26-year-old Peruvian man who was caught with the mummy said, ‘Juanita’ was a kind of ‘spiritual girlfriend’ he kept it at home “and took it out to show his friends.” Drunk in Charge of a Mummy The police found three young men accompanied by a mummy that was inside a thermal delivery suitcase. The discovery occurred on Saturday, February 25, 2023, in the city of Puno, in southern Peru.…

As the data continues to accumulate, it becomes more and more clear that Neanderthals were highly intelligent hominins who built their own unique and remarkable culture. Some of the latest confirmation of this fact has been provided by a team of archaeological researchers from Spain, who recently excavated an expansive collection of huge animal skulls arranged inside a Neanderthal cave north of Madrid. “There have been discoveries of up to 35 crania of large herbivores, which were arranged in an area where the cave enlarges,” said study lead author Enrique Baquedano, when discussing the animal skulls in an interview with Newsweek. “The dates…

Astronomers deal with numbers and measurements, but artists can show us the landscapes the data describe. Comet Lander, Digital An imaginary robotic lander eclipses the Sun as it fires retrorockets in preparation for touching down on a comet. The comet’s surface, though icy, appears dark due to a widespread coating of hydrocarbons. The image was designed for the 2004 book Futures: 50 Years in Space (Harper Design), by Hardy and Sir Patrick Moore. Painters have played a significant but underappreciated role in our exploration of the worlds in our solar system. Scientists tend to specialize in narrow aspects of reality —…

The billions of stars in our home galaxy present artists with infinite possibilities for transporting us to other worlds. Life on a Tidally-Locked World, Acrylic In this scene on a tidally locked world, the parent star of the imagined planet never rises or sets. The world’s plants are all seen facing the same direction, competing with each other to reach toward the light. Something is disturbing the waters … possibly an intelligent animal… The Milky Way and its countless stars, nebulae, and exoplanets were latecomers to space art. The reason is pretty simple: No one knew very much about what lay…

When a star disappears down the throat of a black hole, the flash is just the start of the show. A doomed star makes a close approach to a black hole in this artist’s concept. The extreme tidal forces exerted by the black hole’s gravity are tearing the star apart. I wake up to a chime from my smartphone. Bleary-eyed, I check it — and jolt awake upon seeing an automated email from the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa. The subject line reads: “AT 2018xxx 2hr has been completed.” The message tells me that while I was sleeping, MeerKAT…

New research reveals Boris Johnson’s mummified Swiss ancestor did not die of syphilis, as has long been believed, but of an unknown pathogen. In 1787, at 68 years old, a woman called Anna Catharina Bischoff died in Basel, Switzerland. On 20 October 1975, workers were excavating in the Barfüsser Church , a former medieval Franciscan monastery, when they discovered a brick-walled grave chamber in front of the church choir containing two well-preserved coffins sitting on a pile of bones. One was a simple spruce wood coffin, inside which a female mummy was discovered with her left hand holding her right arm above the wrist. So…

In 1974 Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne placed a bet on whether Cygnus X-1 was really a black hole. The wager was settled in 1990, but the world’s first black hole is still a mystery. An artist’s concept of the Cygnus X-1 binary system. Black holes are a tricky bunch. While Einstein’s theory of relativity predicts they’re common, tracking down the first one was quite a challenge. Unlike stars, black holes themselves don’t emit any light, so the only thing we can measure about them is their size and spin. Today, we know black holes exist — we even have a…

You would have to dig nearly 2,000 miles before reaching Earth’s core — and the 10,000-degree Fahrenheit temperature there would vaporize you anyway. This illustration depicts the four sections beneath Earth’s surface. Our Earth is structured sort of like an onion — it’s one layer after another. Starting from the top down, there’s the crust, which includes the surface you walk on; then farther down, the mantle, mostly solid rock; then even deeper, the outer core, made of liquid iron; and finally, the inner core, made of solid iron, and with a radius that’s 70 percent the size of the…

The history of the Golconda diamonds is steeped in rich tradition and legend. Dating back to the 16th century, the region of Golconda, located in present-day Andhra Pradesh, India, was renowned for its diamond mines and was a major source of diamonds for centuries. The diamonds mined in Golconda were known for their exceptional quality, unique color, and historical significance, making them highly prized by rulers and wealthy merchants all over the world. Despite legends of curses surrounding certain diamonds, the Golconda diamonds are considered some of the most valuable diamonds in the world today. From India to the World:…

Wolf 1069b is the sixth closest Earth-mass exoplanet situated in the conservative habitable zone of its parent star, after Proxima Centauri b, Gliese 1061d, Teegarden’s Star c, and Gliese 1002b and c. An artist’s conception of the surface of the Earth-mass exoplanet Wolf 1069b. Image credit: NASA’s Ames Research Center / Daniel Rutter. “An impressive 5,000 exoplanets and counting have been detected thus far, largely thanks to the past and ongoing radial-velocity and transit surveys,” said lead author Dr. Diana Kossakowski from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy and colleagues. “On the hunt for an Earth analog, out of these…

Scientists who study the origins and evolution of the plague have examined hundreds of ancient human teeth from Denmark, seeking to address longstanding questions about its arrival, persistence and spread within Scandinavia. In the first longitudinal study of its kind, focusing on a single region for 800 years (between 1000 and 1800AD), researchers reconstructed Yersinia pestis genomes, the bacterium responsible for the plague, and showed that it was reintroduced into the Danish population from other parts of Europe again and again, perhaps via human movement, with devastating effects. The historical samples were taken from nearly 300 individuals located at 13 different…

Here are a few ways that humanity may be able to leave the cradle of Earth. The field equations of Einstein’s General Relativity theory say that faster-than-light (FTL) travel is possible, so a handful of researchers are working to see whether a Star Trek-style warp drive, or perhaps a kind of artificial wormhole, could be created through our technology. But even if shown feasible tomorrow, it’s possible that designs for an FTL system could be as far ahead of a functional starship as Leonardo da Vinci’s 16th century drawings of flying machines were ahead of the Wright Flyer of 1903. But this need…

An illustration of a spherical explosion in space. (Albert Sneppen) The colossal explosion resulting from a merger between two neutron stars has an unexpectedly perfect shape. According to a new analysis of the aftermath of a historical neutron star collision observed in 2017, the kilonova explosion produced by the two stars was a completely symmetrical, almost perfect sphere. And astronomers just don’t know why. It contradicts all previous assumptions about and models of kilonovae. “No one expected the explosion to look like this. It makes no sense that it is spherical, like a ball,” says astrophysicist Darach Watson of the Niels Bohr Institute in Denmark.…

The tidal forces at the event horizon of a stellar-mass black hole are much more violent than around a supermassive black hole. Even though a human falling into a supermassive black hole wouldn’t be spaghettified, a star still experiences tidal forces as it falls into a black hole, as shown in this artist’s concept. Why would someone falling into a stellar-mass black hole be spaghettified, but someone crossing the event horizon of a supermassive black hole would not feel much discomfort? First, what exactly causes spaghettification? This process is the result of tidal forces, or the difference in gravity between…

Fossil named Maximus unearthed in South Dakota rated one of most complete T rex skulls ever found Maximus, the 91kg Tyrannosaurus rex skull, retains much of its original shape, with even delicate bones present. Photograph: John Angelillo/UPI/Rex/Shutterstock A Tyrannosaurus rex skull discovered in South Dakota is expected to sell for between $15 and $20m (£13m-£17m) when it is auctioned next month in New York, Sotheby’s has said. The 76m-year-old skull, nicknamed Maximus, is being sold by an anonymous seller at a live auction on 9 December. The skull, which weighs 91kg (200lb) and measures about two metres, is said to be…

TOI-700 is an M2-type star around 102 light-years away in the southern constellation of Dorado. Otherwise known as UCAC3 49-21611 and 2MASS J06282325-6534456, the star is roughly 40% of the Sun’s mass and size and about half its surface temperature. In 2020, astronomers announced the discovery of three exoplanets orbiting TOI-700. The innermost planet, TOI-700b, is almost exactly Earth-size, is probably rocky, and completes an orbit every 10 days. TOI-700c is a gas giant about 2.6 times the size of Earth, and orbits the parent star once every 16 days. The outermost planet, TOI-700d, is 1.1 times the size of Earth, and has…

An enormous mosaic of Stephan’s Quintet is the largest image to date from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, covering about one-fifth of the Moon’s diameter. It contains over 150 million pixels and is constructed from almost 1,000 separate image files. The visual grouping of five galaxies was captured by Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI). Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope reveals never-before-seen details of the galaxy group called “Stephan’s Quintet” in an enormous new image. The close proximity of this group gives scientists a ringside seat to galactic mergers and interactions. Astronomers rarely see in…

The OIII emission nebula Strottner-Drechsler-Sainty Object 1 appears next to M31 as a banded teal arc in this HOLRGB image. Despite being one of the most venerable and prominent objects in the night sky, the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) still has surprises. And a group of amateur astronomers have uncovered the latest: a previously unknown emission nebula lying just southeast of Andromeda and spanning half the width of the galaxy itself. The feature was discovered in images taken last year with an Oxygen-III (OIII) filter by French astroimager Yann Sainty, who worked with Marcel Drechsler and Xavier Strottner to process and…