TAKE A WHIFF Uranus is a lovely robin’s egg blue in this image taken by the Voyager 2 spacecraft when it flew past in 1986. New measurements of the planet’s chemistry suggests it may smell like eggs, too — that is, really rotten eggs.
JPL/NASA
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Magazine
In the April 14 SN: Killer heat, mass insect migrations, the latest Saturn updates, rethinking the Nobel Prize, tectonics on Venus, the science of mass shootings, ancient tool trends and more.
Atom & Cosmos
Topic Image Rail
SHOWING THEIR YEARS Flat spiral galaxies like NGC 1055 (left) have more ordered and younger stars than blobby, spherical galaxies like IC 2006 (right), a new survey shows.
From left to right: ESO; Hubble/ESA and NASA
MOONSTRUCK Details of Charon, the largest of Pluto’s five moons, were finally seen clearly in 2015 when the New Horizons mission passed within 13,000 kilometers of Pluto’s surface.
SwRI/JHUAPL/NASA
Atom & Cosmos
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Astronomy
News in Brief
Young galaxies are flat, but old ones are more blobby
A survey of hundreds of star systems precisely links the shape of a galaxy to the ages of its stars.The Name Game
Celebrity names now mark places on Pluto’s moon Charon
Pluto’s largest moon, Charon, now has 12 new names for its topological features. -
Cosmology
Reviews & Previews
Why the Nobel Prize might need a makeover
In Losing the Nobel Prize, astrophysicist Brian Keating discusses the downsides of science’s top honor.News in Brief
Renowned physicist Stephen Hawking dies at 76
Beyond his research contributions, Stephen Hawking popularized black holes and the deep questions of the cosmos. -
Planetary Science
News in Brief
Uranus smells like rotten eggs
Planetary scientists detected hydrogen sulfide in Uranus’ upper clouds — the same compound that gives rotten eggs their terrible smell.News
This meteorite’s diamonds hint that it was born in a lost planet
Bits of metal nestled inside diamonds suggest the space rock could have formed in a Mars-sized protoplanet in the early solar system. -
Particle Physics
News
The search for mysterious dark matter underdogs steps up
Dark matter particles called axions are finally being put to the test.News
The quest to identify the nature of the neutrino’s alter ego is heating up
The search is on for a rare nuclear decay that could prove neutrinos are their own antiparticles and shed light on the universe’s antimatter mystery. -
Exoplanets
Science TickerNASA’s TESS spacecraft launches to begin its exoplanet search
After reaching its orbit in about two months, the telescope will start scanning nearby stars telltale dips in light that signal a passing planet.News
AI has found an 8-planet system like ours in Kepler data
An AI spotted an eighth planet circling a distant star, unseating the solar system as the sole record-holder for most known planets. -
Astrobiology
News
Lasers squeezed iron to mimic the conditions of exoplanet cores
In the first experiment to measure what exoplanets might be like on the inside, scientists hit iron with 176 lasers at once.News
Americans would welcome alien life rather than fear it
Americans would probably take the discovery of extraterrestrial microbes pretty well.
