What Is the Solar System? How Our Cosmic Neighborhood Took Shape
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…
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Ivan Petricevic
Ivan Petricevic is an investigative journalist and researcher with more than a decade of experience covering ancient history, UAP phenomena, space, and science. He writes about space, science, and history for Večernji list and has appeared as an expert on Discovery Channel and History Channel. He founded Curiosmos, where he reports from primary sources, archaeological research, and field investigations.
How Image Enhancement Reveals Faded Rock Art
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…
Neutron Star or Black Hole? The Signals Astronomers Use to Tell Them Apart
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…
How Archaeologists Date a Stone Circle When the Stones Are Millions of Years Old
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…
Why Venus Can Shine Brightest When It Looks Like a Crescent
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 Has a Ten-Sided Wave at Its South Pole. How Does It Compare With the Hexagon?
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…
Webb Finds 27 Tiny Worlds Beyond Neptune. Their Colors Hold a Clue to the Solar System’s Past
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 Across Yorkshire?
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.
What Is Dark Energy? The Mystery Behind the Universe’s Accelerating Expansion
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…
Why Archaeologists Leave Some Discoveries Unexcavated
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…
How Fast Does Light Travel? The Cosmic Speed Limit Explained
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…
Satellites Are Changing the Night Sky. What Astronomers Can Still See
Satellite constellations can leave bright trails across telescope images. Here is what that means for astronomy and the night sky.
What Is a Neutron Star? The City-Sized Remnant of a Stellar Explosion
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,…
How Archaeologists Reconstruct the Making of Ancient Iron
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…
What Is a Galaxy? How Stars, Gas, Dust, and Dark Matter Stay Together
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…
What Is the Asteroid Belt Really Like? The Space Between Mars and Jupiter Is Mostly Empty
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…
How Do Archaeologists Tell Whether an Ancient Building Was a Home, Shrine, or Workshop?
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…
What Is a Parsec? The Cosmic Distance Unit Astronomers Use Beyond Light-Years
A parsec is a distance defined by parallax. Here is how astronomers use the unit to measure the space between stars and galaxies.
Why Is the Sky Blue While Space Is Black? Earth’s Atmosphere Is the Difference
From the ground, the daytime sky seems to be a blue dome wrapped around Earth. Astronauts looking through a spacecraft window see something very different: a thin blue line at…
A 112°C Test Could Help Expose Forged Ancient Pottery
Archaeologists and museums may soon have a new way to test suspicious clay objects: a controlled heating experiment that separates pottery more than 1,000 years old from modern material. A…
Saqqara Excavation Reveals an Official’s Tomb and Three Sealed Sarcophagi
Archaeologists working at Saqqara have found the Old Kingdom tomb of a senior official named Sekhentyu-Ptah, along with burial shafts, three sealed stone sarcophagi and more than 100 ushabti figurines.…
Why Is Space So Cold If the Sun Is So Hot? The Answer Is Not What Most People Think
Space is often described as freezing, while the Sun is described as a furnace. Both descriptions can be true at the same time, but not in the simple way they…
A Housing Complex and Possible Wine Press Emerge Beside Egypt’s Temple of Sekhmet
A joint Egyptian-Chinese archaeological mission has uncovered a mud-brick housing complex and a stone installation that may have been used as a wine press beside the Temple of Sekhmet at…
A Second Milky Way Cloud Contains More Than 120 Molecules Linked to Prebiotic Chemistry
Astronomers have catalogued more than 120 molecular species in a cloud near the centre of the Milky Way. The finding matters because the cloud contains several compounds associated with the…