Black holes are already some of the strangest objects in the universe, and scientists sometimes dream up some pretty wild theories about their behavior. Like maybe they can accumulate dark matter particles and turn into black hole lasers, beaming radiation out into space.
For years, astronomers have struggled to understand the source of anomalous microwave emissions coming from various locations across the Milky Way galaxy. A recently concluded survey of the planet-forming disks around young stars suggests these strange transmissions are being produced by something rather…
Pluto’s most famous visitor, the New Horizons spacecraft, has woken up after 165 days of hibernation.
No, NASA hasn’t discovered life on Mars yet—but a new result makes it seem like maybe, at some point in the planet’s history, the conditions were ripe for some extraterrestrial beings. Maybe.
As unearthly as it may be, Jupiter shares a phenomenon with our own planet that you might find very familiar: lightning strikes. And lightning on Jupiter is somehow both more (and less) like the lightning on Earth than scientists previously thought.
The Juno spacecraft currently orbiting Jupiter was supposed end its mission by crashing into the gas giant next month. Not anymore!
You may have heard about the White House’s plans to privatize the International Space Station and turn low-Earth orbit into a place of business that NASA can become a customer of, rather than its sponsor. Now, according to an interview with the Washington Post, NASA’s recently confirmed Jim Bridenstine has begun…
A meteor lit up the sky over Botswana, Africa, early Saturday evening. Scientists discovered the six-foot-wide asteroid just hours before it reached Earth.
Astronomers peering closely at images of Pluto have spotted what look like dunes on the surface of the former planet. They wouldn’t be sand dunes, but dunes of methane ice—an Earthly feature on a totally alien world.
It turns out that 8,000 tiny plastic disks in a rotating drum could help scientists develop a technique to forecast avalanches or earthquakes through sound.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ plans to splurge some of his jaw-dropping wealth pushing his private spaceflight company Blue Origin towards the business of moon colonization—think Elon Musk’s dreams of a SpaceX-backed colony on Mars, but much less likely to get everyone involved killed—dropped last year.
On the way to its final orbit around Earth, NASA’s planet-hunting Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has sailed by the moon and snapped its first picture of space. We’ve said several times that TESS would be able to look at 200,000 stars in the 300 light-years around the Earth—but maybe this new shot will…
OneSpace Technologies conducted the first private rocket launch in Chinese history this week, firing off the 30-foot (9 meter) OS-X from a platform in northwest China on Thursday, according to CNN.
China’s mission to explore the Moon’s far side is set to launch in part on Monday (Sunday in the US). As the Guardian reports:
I’m sorry, but Pluto sucks and I’m glad it’s not a planet anymore. It’s smaller than our Moon, and it’s about the same size as several other distant, rocky solar system objects. Have you ever seen the way it orbits alongside its partner, Charon? Classifying it as a planet in the first place was a mistake. Can we get a…
On November 8, 2017, a spinning neutron star inside one of the most studied objects in the sky “glitched” more than it had ever glitched before.
It’s nice to think we’re part of something bigger. And we are, really—in a cosmic, evolutionary sense.
Sometimes, scientists have the answers all along—they just don’t think to ask the question. For example, it appears that in 1997, the Galileo orbiter flew through a jet of water shooting out from Jupiter’s moon Europa without even trying.
It’s been more than six months since the Cassini probe plummeted to its demise, but scientists are still releasing incredible images from two-decade mission to Saturn.
