View larger. | The shortest day is at the solstice. But many are surprised to learn that the latest sunrises come days or weeks after the solstice. This map shows the number of days between earliest sunset and latest sunrise, for various latitudes. And it shows the dates of these events. When is your latest … Read more
Giant, gas-rich planets may have been able to form more easily in the very early universe than they do today, according to astounding new findings from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) that corroborate earlier Hubble Space Telescope evidence. In 2003, Hubble found a massive exoplanet. There’s nothing too unusual about that, but closer inspection … Read more
Napping after overfeeding on food is a dilemma many of us will be fortunate to face on Christmas Day. New research has shown that, billions of years ago, some early black holes also had to nap after overindulging. Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers spotted a dormant supermassive black hole that existed just … Read more
Current theories of the Moon’s formation favor both the Earth and Moon forming from the debris created by the collision of a Mars-sized world with the proto-Earth about 4.5 billion years ago. New research, however, suggests that the Moon later underwent a second melting event that reset the apparent age of many geological samples. Credit: … Read more
Not long ago, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) peered into Cosmic Dawn, the cosmological period when the first galaxies formed less than one billion years after the Big Bang. In the process, it discovered something rather surprising. Not only were there more galaxies (and brighter ones, too!) than expected, but these galaxies had supermassive … Read more