Researchers studying the origins of Stonehenge's Altar Stone have proposed a new possibility for how the enormous rock began its journey from Scotland to southern England.
A team from Sheffield Hallam University and Curtin University, Australia, analyzed ancient ice movement and found that glaciers during Britain's last ice age may have transported the stone from Scotland's Orcadian Basin as far as Dogger Bank in the North Sea. From there, however, people would still have had to move it hundreds of kilometers to Salisbury Plain.
Mars' innermost moon, Phobos, has puzzled planetary scientists for decades. One of the biggest unanswered questions is where it came from. Some researchers think Phobos is an asteroid that was captured by Mars, while others argue that it formed from debris thrown into orbit after a massive object slammed into the planet.
It may seem like we are on the verge of discovering alien life. In 2025, a press release stated that we have the “strongest hints yet” of extraterrestrial life on the exoplanet K2-18b. And when talking about a collected sample from a rock named “Cheyava Falls” on Mars, NASA Administrator Sean Duffy said this was the “closest we have ever come” to discovering life on the red planet.
Comet 3I/ATLAS is continuing to surprise astronomers. New observations from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), of which the U.S. National Science Foundation National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NSF NRAO) is a partner, show that the interstellar visitor contains an unusually large amount of methanol. In fact, its methanol abundance exceeds that seen in almost all known comets from our own solar system.
Partial oxidation of methane (POM) is considered a promising industrial method for producing syngas, a mixture commonly used to make fuels and chemicals. For years, scientists have assumed that metallic nickel (Ni) nanoparticles serve as the main active centers that drive this reaction. However, there has been an important unresolved question. The metallic Ni observed after a reaction may simply form when nickel oxide is reduced by syngas at high temperatures, rather than representing the species that actually performs the catalysis.
A new analysis led by researchers at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, together with Professor Subir Sarkar of the University of Oxford, is challenging one of the central ideas in modern cosmology: that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate because of "dark energy" associated with the quantum vacuum.
Astronomers have directly detected an extraordinarily faint radio signal from hydrogen gas billions of light-years away, demonstrating a promising new method for mapping the vast structure of the Universe.
The international team, led by researchers at the University of Manchester and the University of the Western Cape, used South Africa's MeerKAT radio telescope to measure emissions from neutral hydrogen dating to a period when the Universe was several billion years younger than it is today.
September brings a busy lineup for skywatchers, including a dazzling Venus, a Harvest Moon near Saturn and Neptune, the seasonal equinox, and opportunities to use the Moon as a guide to some recognizable stars and Milky Way features.
Physics allows for black holes far smaller than the enormous objects typically found at the centers of galaxies or created when massive stars collapse. Under the right conditions, microscopic black holes could also form when spacetime enters an unusual critical state and organizes into a repeating, crystal-like pattern.
NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is now just two days from launch, marking the arrival of the agency's next flagship astrophysics mission after the James Webb Space Telescope. University of Arizona faculty and students will be watching from Cape Canaveral as Roman begins its journey toward science operations, which are expected to start in January 2027.