Robin George Andrews

Scientists have long struggled to understand how common planets form. A new supercomputer simulation shows that the missing ingredient may be magnetism.

Scientists have begun to decipher the subtle signs that reveal how explosive a volcanic eruption is going to be.

About 60 million years ago, India plowed into Eurasia and pushed up the Himalayas. But when Lucía Pérez-Díaz reconstructed the event in detail, she found that its central mystery depended on a broken geological clock.

The new volcanic fissures are more otherworldly than they first appear.

Small and cold, Mars has long been considered a dead planet. But a series of recent discoveries has forced scientists to rethink how recently its insides stopped churning — if they ever stopped at all.

Liz MacDonald realized that if she wanted to create the world’s best aurora map, she needed a secret ingredient: Twitter.

The “pinball” model of a slipping fault line borrows from the mathematics of avalanches.

A surprisingly youthful estimate of the age of the rings has stirred a backlash.

A giant star’s death throes may offer the first evidence of a pair-instability supernova, and a glimpse of the first stars in the universe.