Space

A new video shared on YouTube is one of the most amazing things we’ve ever seen in planetary science. The video shows four dots of light moving in partial concentric circles around a black disk at their center. What you’re actually looking at is a planetary system. The four dots are exoplanets, with the black

Jupiter isn’t alone along its orbital path around the Sun. Two giant swarms of asteroids have been snared in the gravitational interaction between the gas giant and our star, leading and trailing Jupiter as it treads its cosmic measure. Between these swarms, known collectively as trojans, we’ve identified more than 12,000 asteroids to date, but

In a recent study published in Sciences Advances, an international team of scientists led by the Technical University of Munich examined the Martian meteorite Tissint, which fell near the village of Tissint, Morocco, on 18 July 2011, with pieces of the meteorite found as far as approximately 50 kilometers (30 miles) from the village. What

Scientists have a problem when it comes to modeling space events inside laboratories: Earth’s gravity tends to get in the way, making it difficult to replicate environments away from our planet. A recently proposed solution takes the form of a tiny glass ball a mere 3 centimeters (just over an inch) in diameter. In spite

JWST’s unparalleled ability to peer into the shrouded hearts of distant clouds has revealed the elements of biochemistry in the coldest and darkest place we’ve seen them yet. In a molecular cloud called Chamaeleon I, located over 500 light-years from Earth, data from the telescope has revealed the presence of frozen carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen,

A galaxy whose light has traveled nearly 13.5 billion years to reach us has just been confirmed as the earliest galaxy found to date. By studying the oxygen content of the galaxy with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), astronomers have precisely dated it to just 367 million years after the Big Bang, a time

Facial pareidolia is the human tendency or illusion of seeing facial structures in an everyday objects – such as seeing the “man in the Moon,” or the face of Jesus on a piece of toast. But here’s a newly found crater on Mars that might be a case of ‘bear-adoilia.’ There’s no denying, the crater

A truck-sized asteroid will pass near Earth on Thursday in one of the closest approaches to our planet ever recorded, NASA said, emphasizing that it poses no danger. Asteroid 2023 BU, which was recently discovered by an amateur astronomer, will zoom by the southern tip of South America at around 4:27 pm PST on Thursday

The propagation of gravitational waves through matter could reveal the ripples in space-time generated by the Big Bang. Two plasma physicists used the propagation of electromagnetic waves through plasma as an analogue for gravitational waves, devising a set of equations that describe what to look for as gravitational waves travel through stars and gas in

Today, multiple space agencies are investigating cutting-edge propulsion ideas that will allow for rapid transits to other bodies in the Solar System. These include NASA’s Nuclear-Thermal or Nuclear-Electric Propulsion (NTP/NEP) concepts that could enable transit times to Mars in 100 days (or even 45) and a nuclear-powered Chinese spacecraft that could explore Neptune and its

Our home, the Milky Way, doesn’t seem particularly odd for a galaxy. Moderately-sized, spiral in shape, with a few kinks suggestive of a disruptive past. But astronomers have just identified a quirk never before seen in any galaxy studied to date: the Milky Way is too big for its surroundings. Specifically, it appears to be

A vast amount of rocks and other material are hurtling around our Solar System as asteroids and comets. If one of these came towards us, could we successfully prevent the collision between an asteroid and Earth? Well, maybe. But there appears to be one type of asteroid that might be particularly hard to destroy. Asteroids

We live in an era of renewed space exploration, where multiple agencies are planning to send astronauts to the Moon in the coming years. This will be followed in the next decade with crewed missions to Mars by NASA and China, who may be joined by other nations before long. These and other missions that

A rare green comet is passing Earth, and this could be humanity’s last chance to see it. Stunning photos are already revealing what you might see if you look to the pre-dawn skies and spot the ball of frozen gas and dust shooting past. Formally, the comet is called C/2022 E3 (ZTF), named for the

A team of astrophysicists has discovered a binary pair of ultra-cool dwarfs so close together that they look like a single star. They’re remarkable because they only take 20.5 hours to orbit each other, meaning their year is less than one Earth day. They’re also much older than similar systems. We can’t see ultra-cool dwarf

If you check in regularly to ScienceAlert, you’ll be familiar with quite a few stunning space images, but a newly published picture has to be one of the best yet: 2 years in the making, 10 terabytes worth of data, 21,400 individual exposures combined, and a final image showing a huge 3.32 billion celestial objects.

Antarctica has a lot going for it when it comes to meteorite hunting. The dark rocks stand out against the icy landscape. Its dry climate keeps weathering to a minimum. And even when meteorites sink into the ice they are often returned to the surface by the churning of the glaciers. In spite of these

Hydrogen is a key building block of the cosmos. Whether stripped down to its charged core, or piled into a molecule, the nature of its presence can tell you a lot about the Universe’s features on the largest of scales. For that reason astronomers are very interested in detecting signals from this element, wherever it

Saturn’s own orbiting winter wonderland, Enceladus, could be in the midst of a relative dry spell, according to new measures on the thickness of its snowdrifts by a team of researchers from across the US. Calculations based on the sizes of a series of depressions called tectonic pit chains suggest the deposits of ice particles

Two major astronomy research programs, called EMU and PEGASUS, have joined forces to resolve one of the mysteries of our Milky Way: where are all the supernova remnants? A supernova remnant is an expanding cloud of gas and dust marking the last phase in the life of a star, after it has exploded as a

Not much can be accomplished in a few hundred milliseconds. Yet for the neutron stars seen in the glints of two gamma-ray bursts, it’s more than enough time to teach us a thing or two about life, death, and the birth of black holes. Sifting through an archive of high-energy flashes in the night sky,

When it comes to finding life outside of our Solar System, planets that closely resemble Earth seem like a good place to start. We can now welcome celestial object TOI 700 e to that group of promising leads. TOI 700 e has been confirmed orbiting inside the habitable zone of its star, TOI 700. That’s

Since its launch in December 2021, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has been breaking records. Now the instrument has spotted its first planet around a star other than our own, and with an estimated diameter equaling around 99 percent of Earth’s it looks somewhat familiar. Observations from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) hinted

If we ever detect an Extraterrestrial Civilization (ETC) and start communicating with them, the messages could take years, decades, or even centuries to travel back and forth. We face a challenging 49-minute long delay just communicating with the Juno spacecraft orbiting Jupiter, and that’s well within our Solar System. Communicating with an ETC that’s hundreds

It turns out that time travel into the past is actually relatively easy. All you need to do is make the universe rotate. The famous mathematician Kurt Gödel was a friend and neighbor of Albert Einstein at Princeton. He became incredibly curious about Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which was and continues to be our

We all know our galaxy, the Milky Way, is big. Really big. But, exactly how far out does it extend? Where are the outer limits? Astronomers aren’t exactly sure, precisely. However, a study of galaxies in the Virgo Cluster accidentally turned up a population of stars in the outer part of the Milky Way. They

Russia said Wednesday that it will send an empty spacecraft to the International Space Station (ISS) next month to bring home three astronauts whose planned return vehicle was damaged by a strike from a tiny meteoroid. The Russian space agency, Roscosmos, made the announcement after examining the flight worthiness of the Soyuz MS-22 crew capsule

The most powerful volcanic eruptions in the Solar System occur not on Earth, but on Io, a sulfurous moon orbiting the planet Jupiter. And now, researchers from the Planetary Science Institute (PSI) in the US have noticed a recent outburst that’s been surprisingly productive, even for a hellish world like Io. In the space around

NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center has released an hour-long time-lapse video that shows 133 days of the Sun’s life. The video shows the Sun’s chaotic surface, where great loops of plasma arch above the star along magnetic field lines. Sometimes the looping plasma reconnects to the star, and other times it’s ejected into space, creating

A newly discovered comet could be visible to the naked eye as it shoots past Earth and the Sun in the coming weeks for the first time in 50,000 years, astronomers have said. The comet is called C/2022 E3 (ZTF) after the Zwicky Transient Facility, which first spotted it passing Jupiter in March last year.

When the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope entered low-Earth orbit in 2008, it opened our eyes to a whole new Universe of high-energy radiation. One of its more curious discoveries was the Fermi Bubbles: giant, symmetrical blobs extending above and below the galactic plane, 25,000 light-years on each side from the Milky Way’s center, glowing in

In a recent study published in Astronomy and Astrophysical Letters, a team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) used various computer models to examine 69 confirmed binary black holes to help determine their origin and found their data results changed based on the model’s configurations. Essentially, the input consistently altered the output,

There’s a lot more out there in space than immediately meets the eye. In the sparse chasms that yawn between the galaxies gravitationally bound in huge clusters, lone stars wander alone, like cosmic rōnin, misplaced and unconstrained. We don’t know where these stars came from. Were they kicked out from host galaxies? Or were they

Saturn’s moon Enceladus is one of the Solar System’s prime extraterrestrial locations for life to thrive. It harbors a global salty ocean that internal heating theoretically keeps at temperatures hospitable to an alien marine ecosystem. Detecting that life, however, is not such an easy matter. The moon is enclosed by a shell of ice that’s

South Korea’s first-ever lunar orbiter Danuri has sent black-and-white photos of the Moon‘s surface and Earth, the national space center said Tuesday. Danuri – a portmanteau of the Korean words for “Moon” and “enjoy” – was launched on a SpaceX rocket from the United States in August 2022 and entered lunar orbit last month. Its

Look up on a clear sunny day and you will see a blue sky. But is this the true color of the sky? Or is it the only color of the sky? The answers are a little complicated, but they involve the nature of light, atoms and molecules and some quirky parts of Earth’s atmosphere.

The Universe should be humming. Every supernova, every merger between neutron stars or black holes, even rapidly spinning lone neutron stars, could or should be a source of gravitational waves. Event the rapid inflation of space following the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago should have produced its own cascade of gravitational waves. Like a

A new analysis of dust retrieved from the Moon suggests that water bound up in the lunar surface could originate with the Sun. More specifically, it could be the result of bombardment of hydrogen ions from the solar wind, slamming into the lunar surface, interacting with mineral oxides, and bonding with the dislodged oxygen. The

Scientists are continuing to analyze samples of rock and dirt brought back by China’s Chang’e 5 lunar rover, and the latest results point to new kinds of geology from regions of the Moon that are yet to be discovered and explored. Seven different types of rock were identified among 1.731 kilograms (3.816 pounds) of 2

Back in March of 2021, a star in a galaxy 250 million light-years away was seen having a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day indeed. There it was, minding its own business, when it got sucked into the gravity well of a supermassive black hole, and torn to smithereens. We know this because multiple

Since the landmark discovery in 1992 of two planets orbiting a star outside of our Solar System, thousands of new worlds have been added to a rapidly growing list of ‘exoplanets’ in the Milky Way galaxy. We’ve learnt many things from this vast catalogue of alien worlds orbiting alien stars. But one small detail stands

Imagine throwing a baseball. Easy, right? Maybe you’ve already done it a few times. Now imagine throwing a baseball on the Moon. Maybe you’ve seen enough videos of astronauts bouncing around up there to have an idea. Here’s a clearer picture, though: On the Moon you could throw that ball clean over the 186-foot-tall Leaning

Not all galaxies are built alike. There are spectacular, sparkling spirals with graceful arms curling elegantly out into space. There are small, indistinct blobs. There are strange rings with hollow centers or diffuse, dim collections of stars that barely look like a galaxy at all. How galaxies get the way they do is something of

Look deep enough into the darkness of space, you’ll find all manner of shapes that stir the imagination. Keep staring, you’ll quickly learn that our Universe can be so much stranger and more wondrous than anything the human mind can dream of. A recent image released by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) has captured just

The James Webb Space Telescope just gave a spiral galaxy 230 million light-years away a new sparkling glamor shot perfect enough for the Christmas tree. While the galaxy has the rather un-glamorous name of NGC 7469, it’s been a fascinating subject to study. JWST has peered into NGC 7469 as part of a survey to

A close study of 40 years’ worth of data has revealed something a little hinky going on with Jupiter. According to a wealth of information collected by both ground- and space-based telescopes, the temperature in Jupiter’s upper troposphere exhibits regular fluctuations that don’t seem to be tied to any seasonal variations. This surprising and intriguing

Russia is examining the flight worthiness of a Soyuz crew capsule docked with the ISS that sprang a leak last week, and might need to send up a rescue vessel for stranded crew, officials said Thursday. The vehicle, known as MS-22, began spraying its coolant into space on December 14, with dramatic NASA TV images

In the not-too-distant future, a planetary scientist will open up a tube of rocks that came from Mars. Thanks to the Perseverance rover, there are at least 17 of these rock and regolith samples, just waiting for analysis on Earth. To get them, the rover has covered about 13 kilometers (8 miles) on its Mars