Space

It will be a magnificent day for England’s south coast. From Portsmouth’s Historic Dockyard and Brighton’s Royal Pavilion to Dorset’s Jurassic Coast and Cornwall’s Land’s End, beaches and cliff tops will be plunged into darkness in the day during the U.K.’s first total solar eclipse for almost 91 years. There is, however, a problem — this scenario…

The Aug. 12 total solar eclipse is less than a week away! We know that eclipse planning can be daunting, so we’ve put together a list of great eclipse apps to help make things that little bit easier. Over 15 million people across Spain, Greenland and Iceland will witness totality on Aug. 12, while almost a billion will bear witness to a partial eclipse, as the moon blocks a portion of the…

Astronomers have captured the death of a massive star from its first faint flash of X-rays, revealing an unusual explosion that may bridge the gap between ordinary supernovas and more extreme, gamma-ray-burst-producing stellar explosions The event began in March 2026, when China’s Einstein Probe spacecraft detected a brief X-ray flash from a galaxy about 500 million light-years away.

When people grow impatient at the lack of success in the search for alien life, researchers often point to how few of the Milky Way’s 100 billion stars or so have been searched so far. But it may be that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) has surveyed more stars than astronomers had realized. Louisa Mason, a PhD student at the University of Manchester, had a recent epiphany…