The mere fact that we live in a universe boggles my mind every once in a while. But thankfully, our cosmic home is a place that follows rules; the laws of physics seem to agree everywhere, and galaxies are uniformly distributed throughout. Except for in this 300-million-light-year-long region, which seems to be…
Scientists directly observed the signal of iron and titanium atoms in the atmosphere of an exoplanet 600 light-years from Earth, a new paper reports.
First, the bad news: Sunday is the anniversary of the disastrous white supremacist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that culminated in a neo-Nazi car attack that killed local woman Heather Heyer and wounded scores of others, as well as resulted in the deaths of two police officers. The organizer of…
The Parker Solar Probe blasted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on Sunday, setting itself on course to become both the fastest human craft ever launched (in the neighborhood of 430,000 miles per hour) and the first to probe the outer corona of the sun.
As it speeds away from the Sun, the New Horizons mission may be approaching a “wall.”
Everyone knows there is no sound in space. After all, a sound wave requires a medium, like air or water, to travel through, and space is mostly a vacuum. But in studying a nearby galaxy cluster, astronomers detected a true occurrence of sound in space—and in this case, the incredibly deep sound was coming from a black…
China claims to have successfully tested a hypersonic aircraft capable of reaching speeds in excess of Mach 6, or 4,563 miles per hour. The cutting-edge vehicle has the potential to penetrate U.S. missile defense systems and be refitted to include a nuclear warhead.
NASA doesn’t just randomly decide what telescopes and satellites to shoot into space and what planet to study next. Instead, a committee of outside scientists drafts a set of goals and recommendations in what’s called a decadal survey. And though it notes some financial setbacks, a midterm review of the last decadal…
When some stars get old, they eject gas and dust, forming a cloud of electrically charged material in space called a planetary nebula. These nebulae all tend to have the same layered structure, but a team of scientists recently spotted a kind of planetary nebula that looks to be inside out.
August 2018 rolled in with a bang, literally, as explosions rocked Caracas, Venezuela on Saturday during a speech by President Nicolas Maduro—and government officials later said bomb-carrying drones were to blame. If the accounts of an attempted assassination using unmanned aerial vehicles is confirmed, the New York…
NASA’s $600 million Kepler space telescope, which is more or less running on thruster fuel fumes nearly a decade after its launch in 2009, woke up from a four-week hibernation phase on Thursday and is transmitting data back to Earth, Space.com reported on Friday. If all goes well, it may even be capable of continuing…
Boeing has delayed two critical tests of its CST-100 Starliner crew capsule following an engine failure during another test in June, setting back the timeline for its plans to use the craft to shuttle crew back and forth from the International Space Station or other possible future in-orbit destinations as part of…
The Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation is holding a series of hearings leading up to another NASA authorization bill, which helps set goals and authorizes funding for the agency (2017-2018's bill is here). On Wednesday, scientists from U.S. universities, the Smithsonian Institution, and NASA…
The 21st century’s longest lunar eclipse has passed, eclipse doomsday fever has subsided, and all that’s left are the memories and pictures, which you can find everywhere online. But one image really stood out to us—not because of the way the Moon looked, but because of how it made the Earth look.
By searching for the telltale, periodic dimming of light from distant stars, astronomers can spot orbiting exoplanets tens to hundreds of light-years away. But how do they know what these bodies look like? Perhaps they first try to imagine how the planets in our own Solar System might appear to a faraway alien world.
Early risers on Wednesday are eligible to observe a rocket launch double header, with multinational company Arianespace planning to launch an Ariane 5 rocket carrying four Galileo GPS satellites for European customers at 7:25am ET and a SpaceX Falcon 9 launch carrying 10 Iridium satellites 15 minutes later at 7:39am…
The astronomers behind a universe-mapping satellite have released the project’s final set of processed data. What you see above is the newest image of the oldest visible light in the Universe—microwave radiation from just a few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang.
 Facebook, which earlier this year abandoned plans to build its own passenger jet-sized, solar powered drones to provide internet access in remote stretches of the world, is once again pursuing plans to launch satellites to do the job instead.
These new views of Mars, taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, show that the entire planet is now engulfed in the dust storm that began in late May. And while orbiters are studying the storm to understand it better, it could spell trouble for the rovers on its surface.
