NASA’s Jupiter-orbiting Juno spacecraft has discovered a new giant storm on the planet. That in itself isn’t surprising – Jupiter has many giant storms. But this storm has shouldered its way into a ring of storms at Jupiter’s south pole, converting a tidy pentagon of […]
A collection of tiny fossilised thigh bones, some just 2.5 centimetres in length, are the first remains of baby dinosaurs ever found in Australia. Discovered in the eastern states of New South Wales (NSW) and Victoria, the bones belonged to baby herbivores that were small […]
Astronomers using the European Space Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) report observing reservoirs of cool gas around some of the earliest galaxies in the Universe. These gas halos, they say, are the perfect food for supermassive black holes at the centre of these galaxies and […]
Steamboat Geyser, the tallest active geyser in the world, erupted more times in 2019 than in any other year, baffling scientists who are trying to understand what triggered this unusual streak of activity. The geyser can shoot water more than 300 feet into the air, […]
Rockfalls, in which gravel- to boulder-sized rocks break away from slopes, skew toward the small end on the scale of landslides. Nevertheless, they remain hazardous. Rockfalls have blocked roads, crushed infrastructure, and taken lives. Reports from around the world suggest that they may be becoming more […]
At 5:54 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time in Potsdam, Germany, a horizontal pendulum suddenly started shaking. The pendulum scratched out spikes in ground movement for a few hours before settling down. All of this sounds perfectly typical for a seismograph, but in fact, the event was […]
Researchers have uncovered around 100 previously undescribed ancient volcanoes buried deep beneath central Australia. That’s both surprising and significant, they suggest. Surprising because they have gone unnoticed despite half a century of oil and gas exploration and production in what are known as the Cooper-Eromanga Basins, […]
Scientists poring over data from NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission are trying to figure out why the near-Earth asteroid Bennu is periodically ejecting rocks the size of ping-pong balls. The find came “sort of by accident,” says Harold Connolly Jr, a cosmochemist and meteoriticist at Rowan University, US, when […]
Sue Smrekar really wants to go back to Venus. In her office at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, The Great Red Spot may have been originally discovered in 1664 by English scientist Robert Hooke, reports Kenneth Chang at the New York Times. Astronomers continued to […]
Sue Smrekar really wants to go back to Venus. In her office at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, the planetary scientist displays a 30-year-old image of Venus’ surface taken by the Magellan spacecraft, a reminder of how much time has passed since an […]