Space

Dec 20th, 2024 - Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have discovered a massive, dormant black hole from just 800 million years after the Big Bang. The early universe was supposed to follow a script: small galaxies, small black holes, steady growth. But as the cosmos often does, it's thrown us a curveball. Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers discovered a massive black hole dating only 800 million years after the Big Bang in the galaxy GN-1001830. The black hole itself is almost ... [Read More]

Dec 20th, 2024 - Debris from ancient volcanic eruptions on Mars could offer new clues in the search for alien life , a new study suggests. The newly discovered rock type was found littered across the landing site of a future Mars rover mission due to launch in 2028. In a study published last month in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets , researchers studied the rocks using data from orbiting satellites and concluded that they were likely laid down from the air, potentially as volcanic ash, billions of ... [Read More]

Dec 20th, 2024 - A new study of more than 26,000 white dwarf stars has finally confirmed a subtle, long-predicted phenomenon: hotter white dwarfs are slightly larger than cooler ones, even when they share the same mass.  The research, led by experts at Johns Hopkins University , verifies a key aspect of how these incredibly dense stellar remnants behave under extreme gravity.  Dead stars and the search for dark matter  The study, published in The Astrophysical Journal , lays important groundwork ... [Read More]

Dec 20th, 2024 - The water that makes up the oceans acted as a key ingredient for the development of life on Earth. However, scientists still do not know where the water here on Earth came from in the first place. One leading idea is that space rocks such as comets and asteroids delivered water to the Earth through impacts. As a planetary scientist , I'm curious about the kinds of space objects that could have led to the formation of the oceans. For the past few years, I've been studying a type of object that I ... [Read More]

Dec 20th, 2024 - Astronomers have discovered a pair of young stars near the supermassive black hole at the heart of our galaxy. And despite living so close to the cosmic behemoth, they are likely to remain intact for a million years. While our pocket of the universe is home to a solitary sun, that's not the norm. More than half of all stars in the sky have one or more companions , yet until now, none have been found near a supermassive black hole. Astronomers attribute this absence to the extreme gravity black ... [Read More]

Dec 20th, 2024 - The Moon, Earth's eternal companion, continues to captivate scientists. Despite decades of research and lunar missions, one fundamental question remains unresolved: how old is the Moon? Current estimates suggest the Moon formed around 4.35 billion years ago, but some evidence hints at an older age that is closer to 4.51 billion years. This discrepancy has fueled debates and inspired new research, including a recent study proposing that the Moon underwent a "volcanic facelift" billions of years ... [Read More]

Dec 19th, 2024 - New studies led by researchers at the University of Central Florida offer for the first time a clearer picture of how the outer solar system formed and evolved based on analyses of trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) and centaurs. The findings, today in Nature Astronomy, reveal the distribution of ices in the early solar system and how TNOs evolve when they travel inward into the region of the giant planets between Jupiter and Saturn, becoming centaurs. TNOs are small bodies, or "planetesimals," ... [Read More]

Dec 19th, 2024 - By In November 2022 Matthew Genge was peering through a scanning electron microscope at a millimeter-sized speck of the asteroid Ryugu when he noticed something was off. A minuscule yet unmistakable rod-shaped tendril of organic matter previously unseen clung to the surface. "I thought, 'Well, that's strange,'" Genge recalls. "Then I found another and another." For a brief time, he and his colleagues mused that they might have just made the most epochal find in human history—the discovery ... [Read More]

Dec 19th, 2024 - Researchers just found an unexpected galaxy using the James Webb Space Telescope ( JWST ). The large swirl of stars is known as a grand-design spiral galaxy, and its exceptionally advanced age could change what we know about galaxy formation. Generally, the older a galaxy is, the farther away it is from us. Scientists can gauge the age and distance of galaxies through something called redshift — a phenomenon that occurs when light shifts to lower-frequency, redder wavelengths as it ... [Read More]

Dec 19th, 2024 - Astronomers have identified a remarkable water reservoir hidden in a corner of the cosmos, circling a quasar more than 12 billion light-years away. At that distance, the light we see today began its journey not too long after the universe itself formed. The water supply in this distant place is huge, containing the equivalent of about 140 trillion times all the water in Earth's oceans combined. This supply is sitting near a supermassive black hole that is about 20 billion times more massive ... [Read More]

Dec 19th, 2024 - Nasa researchers have identified a black hole in galaxy NGC 5084 rotating at an unexpected angle, tipped over relative to its surrounding galaxy. This discovery was made possible through a new image analysis method called Selective Amplification of Ultra Noisy Astronomical Signal (SAUNAS). The findings were published in The Astrophysical Journal on Wednesday. This unusual orientation was discovered using advanced image analysis methods created at Nasa's Ames Research Center. Galaxy NGC 5084 has ... [Read More]

Dec 19th, 2024 - By The end of 2024 is approaching, marking another full loop around the sun for our planet. So Scientific American is here to celebrate with nine of our favorite space-related images from the year. In case you've lost track, 2024 was filled with a host of exploration milestones, groundbreaking science and stunning sky displays that are worth revisiting. Here are some of our highlights from the year in space. Chasing Totality On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, ... [Read More]

Dec 19th, 2024 - "Quite simply, we want to find the birthplace of the solar wind." Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the Solar cycle, Not a sunspot was stirring, not even a burst; The stockings were all hung by the corona with care, In hopes that the Parker Solar Probe would soon be there.  Almost no one ever writes about the Parker Solar Probe anymore. Sure, the spacecraft got some attention when it launched.  It is, after all, the fastest moving object that humans have ever built. At ... [Read More]

Dec 18th, 2024 - Scientists' best theories on how planets form could be wrong, new research suggests. Astronomers studying a still-forming planet beyond our solar system have found that its chemical makeup doesn't fully match the swirling gas and dust disk from which it formed. The finding challenges standard models of planet formation and implies they may be overly simplistic, the researchers say. The budding planet, called PDS 70b, is a world nearly thrice as big as Jupiter and resides about 400 light-years ... [Read More]

Dec 18th, 2024 - A guiding star is key to the Nativity story, so there's symbolism to be found in a daring Christmas Eve mission to give humans their closest-ever encounter with the sun. sun's intense heat, or burn up like a moth in flames. 3.8 million miles above the sun's surface, but that's still dangerously hot territory, NASA says. 10,000 degrees, but for reasons unknown, the corona, or the sun's outermost atmospheric layer, gets hotter the farther out you go, reaching 3.5 million degrees, scientists say. ... [Read More]

Dec 17th, 2024 - Space can surprise even those who spend their lives studying it. People often think of our solar system as just a few planets and a bunch of empty space. Yet new observations suggest we have been living inside a hot, less dense region, and that there may even be a strange cosmic channel connecting us to distant stars. After years of careful mapping, a new analysis reveals what appears to be a channel of hot, low-density plasma stretching out from our solar system toward distant constellations. ... [Read More]