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.
YOU ARE HERE The most precise all-sky map of the Milky Way was released by the Gaia space telescope team on April 25. It shows the total brightness and color of nearly 1.7 billion stars and a few neighboring galaxies (bright spots to the lower right of the main disk).
Gaia/DPAC/ESA
INCOMING Water vapor can be trapped in glass and melted rocks that are created by an asteroid impact. The finding boosts the idea that asteroids brought water to the early Earth.
ratpack223/iStockphoto
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.