ESA’s Gaia mission revealed a massive stellar wave rippling outwards from the center of the Milky Way’s disc and spanning up to 65 000 light-years. The discovery could reshape how astronomers understand the forces shaping stars and gas on galactic scales.
Hurricane Maria made landfall near Yabucoa, Puerto Rico, at 10:15 UTC (06:15 LT) on September 20, 2017, leaving 2 975 excess deaths and causing the longest blackout in U.S. history. The storm showed how fragile infrastructure can turn a natural hazard into a mass-casualty disaster. With the grid collapsed for months, hospitals faltered, medicines spoiled, and thousands died not from winds or floods but from the blackout’s cascading effects.
The Toba super-eruption in present-day Indonesia about 74 000 years ago ejected 2 800 km3 (672 mi3) of ash and formed a 100 x 30 km (62 x 18 miles) wide caldera. Once thought to have nearly wiped out our species, evidence now shows that resilience and adaptability, not collapse, defined humanity’s survival.
A major hurricane struck Galveston Island, Texas, on September 8, 1900, exactly 125 years ago, producing a catastrophic storm surge and winds that killed an estimated 6 000–12 000 people and destroyed much of the city. In less than 24 hours, Galveston changed from a thriving port city into a flattened landscape of wreckage. It remains the deadliest natural disaster in U.S. history.
On September 1, 1859, British astronomer Richard Carrington observed a sudden flash of light erupting from a group of sunspots. Less than 24 hours later, Earth was struck by the most powerful geomagnetic storm in recorded history. Telegraph systems failed, auroras spread across the globe, and the event became known as the Carrington Event.
Researchers using the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope have measured the Sun’s thinnest coronal loops, recorded during an X1.3-class solar flare on August 8, 2024.
Physicists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) demonstrated the cleanest version to date of the double-slit experiment by using two single atoms as the slits, confirming wave–particle duality.
