Space

Well, they’ve done it. After seven years and 6.21 billion-kilometers, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx has officially delivered a capsule of precious Asteroid Bennu dust to Earth. It’s a major, incredible achievement, a feat of space prowess, engineering, dedication, and skill. But although the capsule has reached its destination – Earth – there’s now a lot more work

After a long, successful, and fascinating journey, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is finally about to return its precious cargo to Earth. On September 24, the mission will drop off its collection canister, before zipping back into space on another mission. The cargo it will deliver consists of samples of dust and rubble from a carbon-rich asteroid

A 3D model of a black hole’s erratic feeding pattern reveals a potential explanation for the bizarre behavior of quasars with a dimmer switch. It’s highly unusual for galaxies to do anything in a hurry, but ‘changing-look’ quasars are an exception. They can switch their jets of radiation on and off within mere years or

In 1960, legendary physicist Freeman Dyson published his seminal paper “Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infrared Radiation,” wherein he proposed that there could be extraterrestrial civilizations so advanced that they could build megastructures large enough to enclose their parent star. He also indicated that these “Dyson Spheres,” as they came to be known, could

When the largest stars in the Universe run out of fuel, they detonate as supernovae, collapsing inward and leaving behind a neutron star, black hole, or just wholly vaporizing. What’s happening inside the unfolding explosion is difficult to understand, and especially so for so-called exotic supernovae, the rarest and brightest types of stellar explosions. To

We can’t understand nature without understanding its range. That’s apparent in exoplanet science and in our theories of planetary formation. Nature’s outliers and oddballs put pressure on our models and motivate scientists to dig deeper. Gliese 367 b (or Tahay) is certainly an oddball. It’s an Ultrashort Period (USP) planet that orbits its star in

We may have to rethink our plans for tapping into reserves of water on the Moon. According to a new analysis of lunar craters, these pocks and divots that mar and characterize the lunar surface are too young for the long-term retention of ancient reservoirs of water ice. In fact, most of the craters that

A flawless new image from NASA using a clever mix of photographs from two different cameras has captured a crater on the Moon that has not seen the light of day for billions of years. The ancient pockmark, known as Shackleton Crater, is located in a mountainous part of the lunar south pole, where, due

Engineers working with the European Space Agency have developed a new thruster design smaller than the tip of your finger. Despite its small size, this mini-thruster designed for CubeSats appears to be highly efficient without the use of toxic chemicals. Called the Iridium Catalysed Electrolysis CubeSat Thruster (ICE-Cube Thruster), it allows CubeSats to maneuver without

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe flew right through a massive solar eruption and caught the whole thing on camera. It’s the first up-close footage ever captured of a solar explosion like this. The video, released by scientists at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, features an especially powerful coronal mass ejection that took place last year. CMEs

A new measurement of the Universe has confirmed dark energy makes up close to 69 percent of the sum of everything. That leaves the remaining 31 percent to matter; both of the normal variety – that’s the particles and forces making up everything we can see – and dark matter, the mysterious gravitational poltergeist responsible

On Earth, continents are likely necessary to support life. Continents ‘float’ on top of the Earth’s viscous mantle, and heat from the planet’s core keeps the mantle from solidifying and locking the continents into place. The core is hot because of the presence of radioactive elements that came from neutron star collisions. It should be

One of the most mysterious stars in the Milky Way might soon have an explanation for its odd behavior. It’s called Boyajian’s Star, or KIC 8462852 – less formally known as Tabby’s Star, a yellow-white glimmer some 1,470 light-years away – and its strange short-term brightness fluctuations and longer-term changes have so far defied scientists’

A huge invisible mass could be the reason the Milky Way’s disk is warped and twisted. A new study shows that a tilted, misaligned dark halo – the large blob of dark matter that wraps around and permeates our home galaxy – is the only explanation to date that explains all the features of the

We know there’s ice on the Moon – what’s less clear is where it came from. A new study suggests that waves of electrons, arriving indirectly from Earth and the Sun, are contributing to the formation of frozen water on the lunar surface. These electrons hit the Moon as it passes in and out of

Seen through a giant’s eyes, our Universe’s galaxies cling like foam to the surface of an eternal ocean, drawing into clumps and strings around inky voids. This sparkling web has taken eons to come together, congealing gradually under gravity’s guidance out of what was, billions of years ago, an evenly-spread fog of white-hot particles fresh

An experiment that took place on Mars has shown that it’s feasible to extract breathable oxygen from the thin Martian atmosphere. From its little home in the belly of NASA’s Perseverance rover, the briefcase-sized Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) Experiment (MOXIE) has been repeatedly breaking apart molecules in Mars air to generate a small,

The curvature of space-time around a colossal mass has yielded the most detailed measurement of the cosmic distribution of dark matter yet. Aided by a gravitational lens, a team led by cosmologist Kaiki Taro Inoue of Kindai University in Japan has mapped the mysterious form of matter on the smallest scale we’ve ever seen, with

In response to a new report from an independent panel, NASA says it has appointed a director in charge of research into UFOs — now known as unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAPs — and will work with other agencies to widen the net for collecting UAP data. “This is the first time that NASA has

The astronaut Frank Rubio broke the record for the longest in orbit mission by an American, spending more than 355 days aboard the International Space Station. “In some ways, it’s been an incredible challenge. But in other ways, it’s been an incredible blessing,” Rubio said Wednesday from the ISS during a chat with NASA that

The James Webb Space Telescope has measured the expansion rate of the Universe, and the results are not great news for the biggest crisis in cosmology. The finding is in agreement with measurements made by the Hubble Space Telescope. This means that there’s no error in the Hubble data, and we’re still at an impasse.

Now officially known as unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs), ‘UFOs’ have certainly long captivated our curiosity. NASA commissioned a study team in 2022 to investigate such hard-to-easily-classify reports, and tomorrow they’re revealing the highly anticipated findings at a media briefing. The scarcity of high-quality observations of UAPs – defined as objects in the sky that are

What we thought was a pretty normal spiral galaxy not far from the Milky Way has revealed a hidden surprise. NGC 4632, some 56 million light-years away, is circled by a huge ring of gas that wraps around the galaxy at a highly inclined angle to its galactic plane. Why didn’t we see it until

A potential water world orbiting a dim red star a mere 120 light-years away has just become a little bit more exciting. A probe into the atmosphere of K2-18b reveals the presence of carbon dioxide and methane, as scientists previously predicted for an ocean planet with a hydrogen-rich atmosphere, or Hycean world. Moreover, the observations

For a few hours after a star smashes into a supermassive black hole, some of the brightest light in the Universe is produced. The subsequent flash of radio waves were thought to simmer down within weeks or months of a collision. It turns out we might have been a little impatient to turn our gaze

We have built telescopes in our backyards, and high upon remote mountains, and even launched telescopes into space. With each advancement in our technology, we have made amazing and surprising new discoveries about the Universe. So what should our next advance in observatories be? Based on a new paper on the arXiv, a good choice

The Milky Way should be teeming with small black holes. Somewhere out there, lurking in the corners of the galaxy, an estimated 10 million to 1 billion stellar mass black holes are thought to be just hanging out, dark and mysterious. Because we can’t usually see them, unless they’re active, we can’t take a census.

The Moon was geologically active between 3.7 and 2.5 billion years ago, experiencing quakes, volcanic eruptions, and outgassing. Thanks to the Moon being an airless body, evidence of this past has been carefully preserved in the form of extinct volcanoes, lava tubes, and other features. While the Moon has been geologically inert for billions of

The European Space Agency released photos showing its Aeolus satellite tumbling to a fiery death as it re-entered Earth’s atmosphere at a blazing 16,700 mph. The Aeolus satellite was launched to space in 2018. It was the first satellite with powerful laser technology capable of observing wind on a global scale. Over its 5-year mission,

Spacecraft instruments are highly specialized and can take years to design, build, and test. But a last-minute hack to one of the instruments on the ESA’s Solar Orbiter has allowed the spacecraft to take some difficult observations it would otherwise have been unable to take. It’s all because of one astronomer and an instrument door.

Fluctuations in the light blazing from the brightest galaxies in the Universe could reveal a secret in their cores, astronomers say. According to a new analysis of a type of galaxy known as a blazar, the best explanation for unusual changes in their glow is a pair of supermassive black holes locked in a decaying

India’s Chandrayaan-3 mission delivered its Vikram lander and Pragyan rover to the lunar surface on August 23rd. Now, as the lunar day ends two weeks later, the rover’s mission may be over. The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has put Pragyan into sleep mode. We’re accustomed to rover missions that last years, thanks largely to

A comet called Nishimura discovered just a month ago could be visible to the naked eye this weekend, offering stargazers a once-in-a-437-year chance to observe the celestial visitor. The ball of rock and ice, whose exact size remains unknown, is named after the Japanese amateur astronomer Hideo Nishimura who first spotted it on August 12.

An arrangement of galaxies in a giant bubble has been found not far from the Milky Way, and astronomers believe it could be a relic of the early Universe. Astronomers have named the cluster Ho’oleilana, a Hawaiian name inspired by the chant, Kumulipo, which tells of the creation of structure in the Universe. The cluster’s

Using light that has traveled for more than 11 billion years to reach us, scientists have just measured the most distant magnetic field yet. It was emitted by a galaxy called 9io9, which appears as it was just 2.5 billion years after the Big Bang. Mapping its lines should help astronomers understand how galaxies spin

India’s Chandrayaan-3 mission may have just recorded the first seismic data on the Moon since the 1970s. If confirmed to be natural seismic data, it could finally help scientists understand how the Moon’s insides are arranged. The rumblings were recorded by the Vikram lander’s onboard Instrument for Lunar Seismic Activity (ILSA). It’s the first Micro

The site on the lunar south pole where the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) made its historic Moon landing can be seen in a new image from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. The image was taken on 27 August, just a few days after the mission made its epic touchdown on 23 August. The lander appears

An active supermassive black hole is one of the greatest wonders in the cosmos. A dense, invisible object that can be billions of times the mass of our Sun is surrounded by a vast, churning disk and torus of material, blazing with light as it swirls down onto the black hole center. But how big

The golden compound eye of the most powerful space telescope ever built has given us new insight into a star we saw exploding just 36 years ago. In the intervening years, scientists have avidly watched the development of SN 1987A as it bloomed from a blaze of light first seen in February 1987 to a

A newly discovered exoplanet has presented astronomers with an interesting problem. It’s called TOI-332b, and its physical properties and orbital distance from its star are challenging to explain with current planetary formation theory. With so few exoplanets of its kind detected in the Milky Way so far, it could shed some light on why fast-orbiting,

NASA has spotted a small new crater on the Moon that was likely caused by a Russian probe crash landing on the surface around two weeks ago. The finding was made by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) by comparing before and after images of the estimated impact point, provided by Russian space agency Roscosmos. The

As few as 22 people could sustain a colony of pioneers long enough to establish a human presence on Mars. That’s the conclusion of a new study by a team of researchers in the US that used modeling and simulation to work out the minimum initial population size for a successful Mars colony that goes

A newly discovered exoplanet has characteristics so peculiar that astronomers think it must have experienced a giant collision some time in its past. TOI-1853b is an exoplanet just a smidge smaller than Neptune, but nearly twice as dense as Earth, suggesting a composition high in rock that’s challenging to explain through normal planet formation and

A sprinkling of tiny beads recovered off the coast of Papua New Guinea might have come from a rock with a rather interesting history, having crossed light years of space from its origin around a star that’s not our Sun. While the conclusions are yet to be appropriately reviewed, they’re already provoking debate in the

The far reaches of the Solar System are a dim and distant realm with particulars that elude us. So far from the light of the Sun, even a relatively large planet could easily escape our notice. The trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) that we have found out there, beyond the orbit of Neptune, exhibit some peculiar clustering

Weeks after a cybersecurity incident was detected by researchers at the US National Science Foundation (NSF), a number of telescopes remain offline. The Gemini North telescope in Hawaii and the Gemini South telescope in Chile, as well as a number of smaller telescopes on the mountains of Cerro Tololo in Chile, were shut down out

India only landed on the Moon last week, but its Chandrayaan-3 mission has already made its first scientific observations of the lunar south pole. By shooting lasers at the surface, the onboard rover has confirmed the presence of sulfur, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has announced. It’s the first rover to ever explore the

The Whirlpool Galaxy, aka M51, is one of the most well-known objects in the night sky. It’s close enough and prominent in the northern sky that amateur astronomers have shared stunning pictures of it for decades. But you’ve never seen anything like this: M51 as seen by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). This image