6:13Video · Cosmic Impacts and Planetary Defense
The Asteroid That Was a Fertilizer Bomb
The S2 impact boiled the ocean surface. The nutrients it stirred up may have helped early microbes thrive.
Published October 26, 2026StarPixels Studio
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10:09Video · Cosmic Impacts and Planetary Defense
The Asteroid That Made Earth’s Richest Gold Mine
The Vredefort impact reshaped South Africa and helped preserve its ancient gold deposits.
Published October 13, 20263D print Galaxy M101 at home
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Credit: NASA
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Eyeballs on the Universe: Webb's Early Galaxy Problem Explained
Webb found galaxies in the early universe that shouldn't exist yet. Here's what the 'too many too early' problem means for cosmology.
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Swift telescope on the verge of plunging back to Earth
The U.S. Space Force predicts the Swift Observatory will come crashing down on or around Friday, November 6, 2026, after 22 years in orbit. Most of the 1½-ton telescope is expected to burn up, though dense tungsten and mirror parts could survive reentry.
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Ten years of full moons, in full color
Marcella Giulia Pace's collection of apparent colors documents the full moon from different locations across Italy. A red- or yellow-colored moon usually sits near the horizon, where its light takes a long path through Earth's atmosphere and loses some blue to scattering.
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Last good look at Hartley-IRAS until 2069
Comet 161P/Hartley-IRAS crosses the rich Milky Way north of Altair with a circular green coma, at 10th magnitude. The Moon-free window closes after November 14 and reopens November 27, the day it reaches perihelion.
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TOI-561 b reflects three-quarters of its starlight
Webb watched TOI-561 b for 37 hours, covering nearly four orbits, and found evidence of a substantial global atmosphere on a world once thought too extreme to hold one. Climate models suggest silicate clouds on its dayside act as sunscreen, keeping the planet cooler than a bare rock this close to its star.
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Slow stellar collisions built early supermassive black holes
Slow stellar collisions in UCLA's simulations merged stars in ultra-dense early clusters into one star as massive as its whole cluster. When that star reached the end of its life, it collapsed into a massive black hole, a seed for the supermassive black holes that formed shortly after the Big Bang.
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Mars and Jupiter meet in close approach November 16
Mars and Jupiter draw closer together each night before their close approach on November 16. Through much of the second half of the month, Mercury and Venus join them, forming a mini planet parade in the early morning sky.
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Aurora dances over Iceland's steaming fumaroles
Stéphane Vetter's Halloween photograph captures ghostly towers of steam venting from fumaroles at Hverir in northeastern Iceland beneath green northern lights. Solar activity triggered the geomagnetic storms that sent energetic particles into Earth's upper atmosphere to create the display.
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3I/ATLAS may contain 10-billion-year-old material
Webb's measurements put the deuterium-to-hydrogen ratio in 3I/ATLAS's methane 13 times higher than comet 67P's, higher than any measured in the Solar System. The researchers read that excess as ice formed in a cold, low-metallicity environment under a high rate of cosmic-ray irradiation.
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