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Astronauts Suni Williams (left) and Butch Wilmore (right) give a news conference aboard the International Space Station Associated Press/Alamy After any problem with a rocket launch or mission, experts echo the same refrain: space is hard. As progress in the space industry accelerates, that mantra is becoming more relevant, not less, but that is because […]
The comet Neowise and the Milky Way galaxy Adventure_Photo/Getty Images One of my favourite memories of July 2020 is standing outside on a clear summer evening looking at a beautiful comet, known as C/2020 F3, or Neowise, through a shaky pair of binoculars. It was a strange period, to say the least, but stargazing made […]
Greg Eghigian’s After the Flying Saucers Came and Luis Elizondo’s Imminent both show how our fascination with UFOs goes beyond simple curiosity Source link
The predicted path of asteroid CAQTDL2 over the Philippines Catalina Sky Survey/ESA An asteroid hit Earth and burned up in the atmosphere just east of the Philippines. It was discovered by astronomers only hours before it streaked across the sky in a bright fireball, but went unseen by many on the ground as the view […]
Illustration showing NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft in deep space NASA, APL, SwRI, Serge Brunier (ESO), Marc Postman (STScI), Dan Durda We finally know just how dark it is in deep space. NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has made the first precise measurements of the ambient light that suffuses the universe, called the cosmic optical background. The […]
The solar system’s largest moon, Ganymede, alongside Jupiter in a picture taken by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft NASA/JPL/University of Arizona A massive collision billions of years ago may have dramatically reoriented Ganymede, Jupiter’s largest moon. Naoyuki Hirata at Kobe University, Japan, and his colleagues studied Ganymede’s extensive furrow system, a series of concentric troughs believed to […]
Boeing’s Starliner capsule carried astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams to the International Space Station NASA/Johnson Space Center UPDATE: In a statement sent to Jeff Foust at Space News, NASA said the sound has stopped, and gave an explanation. “The feedback from the speaker was the result of an audio configuration between the space station […]
JWST images of little red dot galaxies Josephine F.W. Baggen et al. (2024) Strangely bright galaxies spotted by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), called “little red dots”, may have more stars packed into them than any other galaxies we know of. The density appears so high that it’s unclear how the stars even survive […]
An illustration of three of the four satellites that make up the Cluster mission to monitor Earth’s magnetic field ESA – CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO A half-tonne satellite will be watched as it falls to Earth by scientists on a private jet, to understand more about how debris breaks up in our atmosphere. The satellite […]
Illustration of a swiftly rotating brown dwarf NASA/JPL-Caltech Dark matter-fuelled brown dwarfs could be lurking at the centres of galaxies. If astronomers manage to spot them, they could teach us about how dark matter interacts with regular matter. Brown dwarfs are vast balls of gas, between 13 and 72 times as massive as Jupiter but […]