Space

Mar 7th, 2025 - Scientists have determined that around 14 million years ago, our Solar System traveled through a densely populated galactic region and might have experienced increased interstellar dust, which could have influenced Earth's climate and left signals in geologic layers. An international research team has uncovered this journey through the Orion star-forming complex, part of the Radcliffe Wave structure. The experts propose that the Solar System's passage through this zone could have briefly ... [Read More]

Mar 7th, 2025 - Sky This Week is brought to you in part by Celestron. Friday, March 7 Look north after dark tonight to find the curved form of the Little Dipper. The smaller of the two famous dipper-shaped asterisms in the northern sky, the Little Dipper extends from the North Star, Polaris, at the end of its handle. But while this 2nd-magnitude star is famous for currently sitting at Earth's North Celestial Pole, Polaris isn't the only such sun to have this claim to fame.  Earth has a slight wobble as it ... [Read More]

Mar 7th, 2025 - The European Space Agency's (ESA) International Gamma-Ray Astrophysics Laboratory (Integral) was launched on October 17, 2002 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Its mission was to observe the extreme and ever-changing cosmos. "For over two decades, Integral has shown us time and time again how important it is to look at the sky in gamma-ray light," noted Jan-Uwe Ness, ESA's Integral Project Scientist. "Some of the bursts of light associated with extreme physical events in our ... [Read More]

Mar 6th, 2025 - A team of theoretical physicists has proposed a new way to test one of the most intriguing predictions of Einstein's theory of general relativity : gravitational memory. This effect refers to a permanent shift in the fabric of the universe caused by the passage of space-time ripples known as gravitational waves. Although these waves have already been detected by observatories such as the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and the Virgo interferometer, the waves' ... [Read More]

Mar 6th, 2025 - Eight days after launch, a second commercially built moon lander, this one built by Houston-based Intuitive Machines, is poised for touchdown Thursday near the lunar south pole to evaluate the environment where NASA astronauts plan to land in the agency's Artemis program. Known as Athena, the IM-2 spacecraft was expected to drop out of orbit and touch down 100 miles from the moon's south pole at 12:32 p.m. EST. The spacecraft is loaded with sophisticated instruments, a small rover, experimental ... [Read More]

Mar 6th, 2025 - Long-standing investigations into the birth and formation of stars, planets, and galaxies have given rise to many exciting revelations. One such fascinating area of research is the study of planet-forming disks – the cosmic nurseries that assist in the generation of new planets. Traditionally, researchers believed that these disks existed for only a brief period in a star's life. Most estimates suggested that within 10 million years, they would dissipate, leaving behind either fully ... [Read More]

Mar 6th, 2025 - There's a hidden "seismic highway" beneath Mars' surface. On February 3, 2021, a rock from space slammed into Mars, carving a 21-meter-wide crater and sending seismic waves rippling across the planet. These waves traveled exactly 1,640 kilometers before reaching NASA's InSight lander, which has been listening to the planet's rumblings since 2018. The event sparked a detective story linking meteor impacts and marsquakes, the Martian version of earthquakes. And they've done it with the help of ... [Read More]

Mar 6th, 2025 - An ambitious new survey by the Hubble Space Telescope provides the first-ever bird's-eye view of all known dwarf galaxies orbiting the Andromeda galaxy. The results reveal that over billions of years, Andromeda and its family of dwarf galaxies have experienced markedly chaotic interactions — like a game of bumper cars — compared with the relatively placid evolution of the galaxies circling the Milky Way . The findings, published in The Astrophysical Journal , demonstrate that we may ... [Read More]

Mar 5th, 2025 - By Scientists today are quite sure about how long our universe has existed: it's been 13.8 billion years, give or take 59 million years , since the cosmos burst into being via the big bang. But they're much less certain about a related question: When could life have first arisen, somewhere out there? Our solar system formed a mere 4.6 billion years ago, after two thirds of cosmic time had already elapsed, and life seems to have happened here almost as soon as Earth cooled down from its fiery ... [Read More]

Mar 5th, 2025 - March 5 (UPI) -- Engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory have conserved energy supplies on the record-setting Voyager 1 & 2 deep space probes nearly 50 years after their missions launched to extend them further. NASA launched the probes in 1977, which rely on a diminishing radioisotope power system that uses the heat from decaying plutonium to generate electrical power. Each probe loses about 4 watts of power every year, but NASA has extended their respective missions by shutting down ... [Read More]

Mar 5th, 2025 - If there was a contest for the most interesting moon in our solar system, Callisto would be a contender. Jupiter's second-largest moon has more impact craters on its surface than any other planetary body in the solar system, and it has tons of ice on its surface as well.  For decades. researchers have theorized that resting beneath Callisto's pockmarked surface is a liquid saltwater ocean that spans the entire moon. After taking a closer look at data from 30 years ago, researchers now have ... [Read More]

Mar 5th, 2025 - Astronomers may have solved a enigma involving a mysterious X-ray signal from a dying star that's been puzzling scientists since 1980. New data from NASA 's Chandra X-ray Observatory telescope and the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton satellite has shown that a planet may have been destroyed by a white dwarf—one of the dimmest stars in the universe—at the center of a planetary nebula known as the Helix Nebula, or "WD 2226-210". A planetary nebula is a star in its late stage that ... [Read More]

Mar 4th, 2025 - Astronomers deeply concerned that darkest, clearest skies in world will be compromised by proposed facility nearby In the Atacama desert, the driest non-polar region on Earth, the sky shines when the sun sets. Up in the arid hills 130km south of the Chilean city of Antofagasta, comets burn brightly and flawless trails of stars and nebulae streak the night sky. So complete is the darkness in this part of the world, that Indigenous peoples staring up at these skies contemplated the dark spots in ... [Read More]

Mar 4th, 2025 - The gargantuan collision of two neutron stars detected with gravitational waves in 2017 sparked one of the largest collective efforts in astronomy, as more than 70 teams scrambled to study its aftermath . Now researchers have devised a machine-learning technique that could trigger such an observing campaign even before the collision occurs — and enable telescopes to watch how stars collide in real time. The algorithm was trained on simulations of the data that a gravitational-wave ... [Read More]

Mar 4th, 2025 - NASA is tracking a bus-sized asteroid zipping past the Earth at nearly 16,000 miles per hour today. The asteroid, known as "2025 DM7," is estimated to be about 42 feet across and soared past our planet this morning at a distance of about 294,000 miles, according to NASA 's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). The space rock could be anywhere between around 33 and 72 feet in diameter, noted the JPL's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS). 2025 DM7 is not the only asteroid within the vicinity ... [Read More]

Mar 3rd, 2025 - An international team of researchers has discovered that previously observed variations in brightness of a free-floating planetary-mass object known as SIMP 0136 must be the result of a complex combination of atmospheric factors, and cannot be explained by clouds alone. Using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope to monitor a broad spectrum of infrared light emitted over two full rotation periods by SIMP 0136, the team was able to detect variations in cloud layers, temperature, and carbon chemistry ... [Read More]