Photo & Video Chronology — Kīlauea summit episode 55 - USGS (.gov)

A misty view of the north vent lava fountain feeding streams of lava flows down the shield-like structure that has built up around the vent. This photograph, from the Steam Vents in Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park, was taken around 5:45 a.m. HST on October 17, 2026. USGS photo by K. Mulliken. Episode 55 of lava fountaining in Halemaʻumaʻu began at the summit of Kīlauea began at 3:19 a.m. HST on October 17, 2026.

Regular lava fountains at Hawaii's iconic site have happened just three times since 1823 On April 23, 2026, Kilauea began its 45th lava fountain episode since the current eruption began in December 2024. By September 2026, the volcano had spewed 54 lava fountains, some hundreds of meters high.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket transformed the early morning sky into a spectacular display of light on October 13, 2026. As the rocket climbed above Earth carrying a Dragon spacecraft, sunlight illuminated its expanding exhaust plumes, creating an enormous glowing shape that resembled a jellyfish. This striking phenomenon, known as a "jellyfish," occurs when a rocket launches near sunrise or sunset. Sunlight reaches the exhaust high in the atmosphere, making the spreading plume shine brightly against the darker sky below.

TOKYO (AP) — Japan is set to launch a spacecraft on the world's first mission to bring back samples from Phobos, one of the two small, potato-shaped moons orbiting Mars.

Archaeologists working at an ancient burial complex in Peru have uncovered remarkable evidence of hairless dogs that lived more than 1,200 years ago, long before the rise of the Inca Empire. The discoveries include naturally mummified remains, unusual skeletal features, and clues about what the animals ate and how they were treated by the people around them. Peruvian hairless dogs are a distinctive Indigenous breed known for their slender bodies, pointed ears, and lack of fur. They frequently appear in pottery created by ancient societies along the Andean coast. Today, a variation of the breed is recognized by the American Kennel Club as the Peruvian Inca Orchid. The dogs are also an important national symbol, having been officially designated part of Peru's cultural heritage in 2000.

Our early Earth was a heavy metal album cover: a molten ball covered in a global lava ocean, spewing lethal gases while being pelted by the flaming space-rocks of our Solar System's violently chaotic afterbirth. Over the next 4.5 billion years of hectic cosmo-geological time, it has settled down a bit, allowing humans, lemurs, and others to emerge. A vision of this hellish ancient reality remains, (hopefully) never to be glimpsed by human eyes: our molten metallic core, blazing about as hotly as the surface of the Sun. But our core constantly sends chemical messengers up through its layers, including the space-borne ingredients of its birth, locked away for about one-third the lifetime of the Universe. This includes the hydrogen that was drawn in from the giant cloud of gas and dust that formed the Sun, which continues to ooze up from the core and turns into water in the mantle and crust – not a splashy-sloshy water, but a water trapped in minerals. Early Earth may have looked something like this.