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No matter what, you do not want to find yourself near a neutron star.
These stellar beasts, made mostly of neutrons, are basically ultra-dense cosmic corpses roaming around space and, with incomprehensibly strong gravitational fields, torturing everything in their paths.
A tumultuous week on the surface of the sun will provide a nice opportunity to see the Aurora Borealis (in the northern hemisphere) and Aurora Australis (the southern equivalent) late Friday and early Saturday.
Our local star has generated a fair amount of solar flares in recent days, along with a few coronal mass ejections, which are the blasts of charged plasma that can trigger bright auroras farther away from Earth's poles than normal when they collide with our planet's magnetic field.
It may be one of the most widely observed space rocks no one knew existed just a day earlier. An asteroid officially named 2023 CX1 (it also went by the temporary label Sar2667 during its approach toward Earth) was discovered Sunday evening by an observatory in Hungary. Just seven hours later, it could be spotted burning up as a brilliant fireball over the English Channel before a potential audience of millions.
This marks just the seventh time ever that a meteoroid has actually been spotted in space before it impacted the atmosphere, according to the European Space Agency. The tiny size of the mini bolide -- it was just one meter across at the time of discovery -- makes the feat all the more impressive. It was first spotted by Krisztián Sárneczky at the Piszkéstet Observatory, who also made a similar discovery of asteroid 2022 EB5 last year just before it met its own demise in our atmosphere.
In 1907, Albert Einstein presented the world with a startling truth about our universe. Gravity, he realized, isn't quite as strange and mysterious as it feels.
Rather, it's kind of the same thing as acceleration -- a force we're very used to thinking about on the regular. He called it the equivalence principle, and soon, this eye-opening concept would blossom into the mind-bending theory of general relativity. The rest, as they say, is history.
Deep inside Ecuador's Río Negro-Sopladora National Park, the line between fantasy and reality vanishes. At least, that's what scientists who recently discovered a new frog species say of their time exploring this multithousand-acre milieu of mountainous slopes, wispy trees, sparkling rivers and weeping ombré flowers.
They even named the golden-toed frog they stumbled upon Hyloscirtus tolkieni -- after one of their favorite authors, J.R.R. Tolkien, writer of the Lord of the Rings series and the brains behind every whimsical crevice of Middle-earth.
