
Pangaea Ultima, the Next Supercontinent, May Doom Mammals to Far-Future Extinction
250 million years from now, the emergence of a new supercontinent could render most of Earth’s surface uninhabitable for mammals
Jonathan O'Callaghan is an award-winning freelance journalist covering astronomy, astrophysics, commercial spaceflight and space exploration. Follow him on Twitter @Astro_Jonny Credit: Nick Higgins
250 million years from now, the emergence of a new supercontinent could render most of Earth’s surface uninhabitable for mammals
Magnetars possess magnetic fields that are trillions of times stronger than those of ordinary stars. Now we might have seen one of these extraordinary objects about to form
The Luna 25 spacecraft will attempt to land at the lunar south pole for the first time in a hunt for valuable water ice
Astronomers are now seeking to pinpoint the origins of an exciting new form of gravitational waves that was announced earlier this year
Astronomers are piecing together the final moments of supernova 2023ixf and learning more about it than any other in recent history
The Euclid mission will probe dark energy and dark matter like never before, setting the stage for an international, multiobservatory push to solve some of the universe’s deepest mysteries...
Telltale evidence gathered by the James Webb Space Telescope suggests we’re closer than ever before to finding elusive Population III stars
White dwarfs, Earth-sized exoplanets, early galaxies and even Saturn’s moon Enceladus are on the agenda for JWST’s second year in space, but exomoons and others miss out
A new way to gauge the universe’s expansion rate has delivered a confusing result that may conflict with previous related measurements
New results from a U.A.E. orbiter suggest Mars’s moons may be pieces of the planet. A Japanese mission will tell us for sure
We now know that the first galaxies in our universe formed shockingly fast, thanks to the latest results from the James Webb Space Telescope
A half-kilogram’s worth of samples gathered by NASA’s Perseverance rover for eventual return to Earth holds weighty implications for life on Mars
A new European mission is the first of two spacecraft—with the other coming from NASA—that will hunt for signs of habitability on Jupiter’s icy moons
The “amorphous” solid is denser and could be water “frozen in time”
The James Webb Space Telescope is opening an exciting new chapter in the study of exoplanets and the search for life beyond Earth
New Horizons is about to wake up and study the Kuiper Belt, the universe, and even Uranus and Neptune. But a new target to visit could trump them all
Researchers are convinced the James Webb Space Telescope has glimpsed an unexpected population of galaxies in the early universe. Now they’re trying to decide what this means for our understanding of the cosmos...
Elon Musk’s Starlink and other satellite sources of light pollution and orbital debris should face an environmental review, the U.S. Government Accountability Office finds
The DART spacecraft has purposefully crashed into the asteroid Dimorphos, hopefully changing its orbit by a few minutes, in a milestone test of future planetary defense techniques
A new potential rule from the U.S. Federal Communications Commission would set a five-year deadline for defunct satellites to be removed from space
Support science journalism.
Thanks for reading Scientific American. Knowledge awaits.
Already a subscriber? Sign in.
Thanks for reading Scientific American. Create your free account or Sign in to continue.
Create Account