We all know that a dropped or shaken can of soda carries the risk of causing a fizzy rash. People use different techniques to prevent these bubbly explosions, including tapping the top of the can. This advice has been bandied about for years, but does it really work? The answer lies in the physics of … Read more
2026-08-22T10:05:12.444Z Where will the partial lunar eclipse be visible on August 27-28? The partial phase of a lunar eclipse captured over Canada in 2025. (Image credit: Photo by Chen Shaojin/VCG via Getty Images) The good news is that, unlike a solar eclipse, a lunar eclipse can be seen from anywhere the moon is above the … Read more
China is set to launch its Chang’e-7 unmanned robotic space mission, possibly as soon as Monday morning, to search for water ice in the permanently shadowed craters of the moon’s south pole. This is China’s seventh and most ambitious lunar mission so far. Here’s what we know about it. What do we know about Chang’e-7? … Read more
China is about to launch Chang’e-7, its most technologically complex lunar mission to date, in its search for reserves of frozen water in permanently shadowed craters near the moon’s south pole. The unmanned mission, named after a mythical Chinese moon goddess, will include deploying a robotic lander, a rover and a “jump” probe to one … Read more
Artemis II mission makes history with lunar flyby, historic distance The Artemis II mission to the moon makes a historic lunar flyby, pushing the boundaries of human deep space travel. The crew will soon surpass Apollo 13’s flight distance record, becoming the furthest humans from Earth. NASA astronaut Matthew Dominick emphasizes this mission as a … Read more
The Universe can do crazy things, especially when it comes to scale. From giant black holes to massive, sheet-like walls of galaxies, our reality is full of mind-blowing snarls. But a galaxy called IC 1101 is a crazy thing that dramatically exceeds the upper limit of normal. Using the deepest observations yet of IC 1101, … Read more
There is no altitude at which Earth’s atmosphere simply stops. The blue sky turns black, airplanes lose the ability to fly, and orbital motion takes over, but an increasingly fine population of particles continues far beyond the conventional edge of space. The most widespread neutral component is atomic hydrogen. Sunlight shines it at an ultraviolet … Read more
Oxidation should be almost impossible on the Moon. It has no substantial atmosphere, almost no liquid water, and a surface bombarded for most of each month by hydrogen from the solar wind. Hydrogen is a reducing agent, the opposite chemical to the oxidizing conditions that convert iron to rust. However, researchers analyzing data from India’s … Read more
Beneath their thin upper atmospheres, our solar system neighbors Neptune and Uranus are literally raining diamonds into their high-pressure, high-temperature middle atmospheres. The conditions there are so extreme that researchers were only able to replicate them in a test space less than a few thousandths of an inch (or a few hundred micrometers) thick, using … Read more
New research suggests that if dark matter was made up of “dark photons,” it would not have heated the early cosmos as scientists previously thought. If correct, this discovery could represent a paradigm shift in the search for the most mysterious things in the universe. Dark matter remains so elusive because, despite outweighing the everyday … Read more