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A terrace project in Rebild uncovered about 18.5 kilograms of Viking-Age silver. The objects show how wealth moved, was measured and was hidden in tenth-century Denmark. A new terrace was…
The name that keeps pulling archaeologists back to the eastern frontier What if a city that appears in the records of ancient Egypt has been sitting in plain sight, hidden…
Look into the middle of N44 and the most striking feature is what seems to be missing. A vast opening interrupts the glowing gas, while stars crowd the surrounding scene.…
What might happen when the ingredients of life have an entire landscape in which to react? On Titan, NASA hopes to investigate that question by flying from one patch of…
Dig into an old settlement in the Amazon and the ground itself can reveal that people lived there. Beneath the vegetation, patches of dark soil contain charcoal, broken pottery and…
Imagine finding a Roman coin hundreds of miles from the place where it was made. Who carried it there? A soldier, a merchant, or someone whose journey has left no…
What would a melon served in medieval China have looked like? Two seeds recovered from an ancient port are helping researchers approach that question through the fruit’s DNA. A new…
Look up at the night sky and it is easy to imagine a few bright worlds hanging in an empty blackness. But what are we really looking at when we…
What if a rock face that looks empty to us is still carrying a faint memory of paint? A digital photograph can preserve tiny differences between pigment and stone even…
A brilliant X-ray source is not automatically a black hole. Matter falling toward a neutron star can also become intensely luminous, and some neutron stars have surprised astronomers by producing…
A stone can be millions of years older than the monument built from it. Measuring when its minerals formed therefore cannot, on its own, reveal when people dragged it into…
Venus can reach its greatest brilliance while a telescope shows only a crescent. A nearly full Venus exposes more of its sunlit hemisphere, yet that does not necessarily deliver more…
Saturn’s south pole has a ten-sided atmospheric wave, giving astronomers a new counterpart to the planet’s famous northern hexagon. The southern pattern appears to be evolving, raising a question that…
Twenty-seven faint objects beyond Neptune have emerged from a deep James Webb Space Telescope survey, extending the search for the solar system’s building blocks to worlds only kilometres across. Hubble…
Why were the Devil’s Arrows hauled 11 miles? Mineral fingerprints point to Brimham Rocks, while archaeology still has to explain the route, methods and motive.
Dark energy is one of the least satisfying names in astronomy because it sounds more specific than it is. Scientists did not discover a glowing substance called dark energy. They…
Finding an ancient structure does not always mean that archaeologists should uncover all of it immediately. In some cases, the most responsible decision is to leave part of a site…
In empty space, light travels at exactly 299,792,458 meters per second. That is about 300,000 kilometers per second, or 186,282 miles per second. It is the fastest speed at which…
Satellite constellations can leave bright trails across telescope images. Here is what that means for astronomy and the night sky.
A neutron star is what remains after the core of a massive star collapses. It is not a small ordinary star. It is the crushed core of a dead one,…
An ancient iron object can look simple: a blade, nail, tool or fragment of a chain. Making it required a long chain of decisions, from finding ore and fuel to…
When people picture a galaxy, they often imagine a bright spiral like the Milky Way or Andromeda. The shape is memorable, but it is only the visible part of the…
Popular images of the asteroid belt usually show a spacecraft weaving through a crowded field of tumbling rocks. The real region between Mars and Jupiter is far less dramatic—and more…
An ancient building does not come with a label on the door. When archaeologists uncover walls, they have to work out what people did inside them from the traces left…