Will all the warped images and funny names, it can be easy to forget that machine learning can have important uses in science—specifically, when it comes to categorizing things. Scientists have lately been putting a neural network to good use identifying distant galaxies.
The European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecraft team has dropped its long-awaited trove of data about 1.7 billion stars. You can see a new visualization of all those stars in the Milky Way and nearby galaxies above, but you really need to zoom in to appreciate just how much stuff there is in the map. Yes, the specks are…
Astronomers from the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission will release the biggest map of our galaxy ever tomorrow, using data collected by the Gaia space telescope. That includes 1.7 billion stars, as well as new information that could potentially solve some cosmic mysteries.
I think I’m going to let this one speak for itself:
Eerie similarities unite vastly different scientific ideas in sometimes utterly surprising ways. One of these similarities may have allowed scientists to recreate the expanding universe—on a countertop.
NASA has released incredible new images of the Lagoon Nebula taken by the Hubble space telescope, in honor of its 28th anniversary and presumably 4/20. Dude... have you ever like... thought about how small we are... and how big the universe is...?
The US Senate voted to confirm Jim Bridenstine as the NASA administrator in a 50-49 vote today. The position has been vacant since January 2017. President Trump first nominated Bridenstine this past September.
Jupiter’s sandy swirls and blue-hued poles are visible even from Earth. But the Juno spacecraft’s crisp and colorful images begin as warped and dull raw files. The fantastic finished visuals are the result of enthusiastic amateur astronomers, software developers, and artists communicating over message boards. They…
Update, April 18, 7:05pm: NASA launched the TESS spacecraft from Cape Canaveral, Florida at 6:51pm local time, hitting its 30-second launch window.
An igloo-looking habitat sits on a volcano’s rocky soil. Six astronauts have been living there isolated for months, doing geologic field work. It takes around twenty minutes for any message to travel between the habitat and Earth.
NASA’s TESS, or the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, will launch on Monday aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida, if everything goes to plan. People are excited.
Silly fringe theories about Planet X—an imagined planet typically named Nibiru that is on course to hit or pass by Earth with disastrous consequences—are the kind of thing normally relegated to vanity press-published books or those tabloids you browse in the supermarket checkout aisle. On Wednesday, they made it into…
You might think you have gravity pretty well figured out. If you drop a ball out of a window, a short time later it will hit the ground. The higher up you drop it, the faster it travels before it hits the ground.
On January 16th 2018, a bright flash lit up the sky over Michigan, accompanied by a loud boom. Caught on dash cams and home surveillance systems, the meteor briefly turned night to day as it streaked to the ground at almost 36,000 miles per hour, causing a blast wave equivalent to a minor earthquake.
NASA test dummies go through a lot so humans don’t have to. They get used for brutal impact tests, and sometimes said tests don’t go so well... for the dummies, not necessarily the scientists.
Pretty Scientific is a new Gizmodo series where we explore how the best images in science were created and why.
There are few easier ways to get people to read your website than to scare them. That’s how we ended up with the media frenzy surrounding Tiangong-1, and it’s why InfoWars continues to exist. It’s also how we’ve ended up with folks telling you the universe is due to end. Heck, we’re guilty ourselves.
I can’t beelieve it! Maybe one day there will be bee-like robots buzzing around the surface of Mars.
How do we find a tiny shred of self-understanding in this vast universe? More simply: how did we get here? A proper map could help us answer this question.
When you look up into the night sky, you see lots of stars—but all of them are members of our own Milky Way galaxy. With the help of some spacetime-warping science, though, our eyes can now peer much deeper into distant space.
