Hours after the asteroid that ended the age of dinosaurs struck Earth, a vast cloud of microscopic rock dust may have turned the atmosphere into a giant heat trap that reflected the returning blast of heat back toward the surface, making the first catastrophic hours even more dangerous than scientists had realized
The light from IC 1101 fades so gradually into the darkness of space that astronomers struggled to tell where the galaxy actually ends, until ultra-deep observations peeled away deceptive scattered starlight and revealed a long-hidden boundary surrounded by an even larger ghostly envelope stretching hundreds of thousands of light-years farther
Neptune’s tiny inner moons should never have been able to make the water-formed minerals coating their frozen surfaces, leaving scientists to wonder whether these overlooked worlds are actually the shattered remains of ancient moons whose hidden interiors have survived a catastrophic destruction
Barely visible rings suddenly emerged across Venus only after its ordinary sunlight was viewed through an extraordinarily sensitive polarimeter, hinting that enormous atmospheric waves may have been hiding above the planet’s clouds all along
