Space

Apr 25th, 2024 - When NASA released images of Pluto in 2015 taken by the New Horizons spacecraft, many were captivated by the dwarf planet's heart-shaped feature, now called Tombaugh Regio.   And now the mystery of how this "heart," which is nearly 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) across, came to be may be solved. A recent study in  Nature Astronomy  reveals how the western half of the heart, known as Sputnik Planitia, is the result of a massive impact. Based on simulations, the team suggests a ... [Read More]

Apr 25th, 2024 - Scientists have identified one of the oldest known stars outside the Milky Way . The discovery, reported in March in the journal Nature Astronomy , has uncovered a relic from the early days of the universe in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way — and it's revealing the conditions from a time before the sun even existed. The first stars born after the Big Bang lived and died billions of years ago, so there are none left to tell the story of the early ... [Read More]

Apr 25th, 2024 - About a trillion tiny particles called neutrinos pass through you every second. Created during the Big Bang, these "relic" neutrinos exist throughout the entire universe, but they can't harm you. In fact, only one of them is likely to lightly tap an atom in your body in your entire lifetime. Most neutrinos produced by objects such as black holes have much more energy than the relic neutrinos floating through space. While much rarer, these energetic neutrinos are more likely to crash into ... [Read More]

Apr 24th, 2024 - A surprise appearance of a new comet made the April 8 th total solar eclipse all the more memorable. Any dedicated 'umbraphile' will tell you: no two eclipses are exactly the same. Weather, solar activity, and the just plain expeditionary nature of reaching and standing in the shadow of the Moon for those brief moments during totality assures a unique experience, every time out. The same can be said for catching a brief glimpse of what's going on near the Sun, from prominences and the pearly ... [Read More]

Apr 24th, 2024 - New movies of two of the most famous objects in the sky—the Crab Nebula and Cassiopeia A—are being released from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. Each includes X-ray data collected by Chandra over about two decades. They show dramatic changes in the debris and radiation remaining after the explosion of two massive stars in our galaxy. The Crab Nebula, the result of a bright supernova explosion seen by Chinese and other astronomers in the year 1054, is 6,500 light-years from Earth. ... [Read More]

Apr 24th, 2024 - The initial step in the search for extraterrestrial life involves identifying the presence of liquid water. The moons of Saturn and Jupiter like Enceladus, Ganymede, Europa, and Callisto are suspected of holding oceans of liquid water beneath icy crusts. Similarly, some exoplanets beyond our solar system likely host liquid water, crucial for habitability. But detecting water, when we can't physically access these celestial bodies, poses challenges. Ice-penetrating radar, a geophysical tool, has ... [Read More]

Apr 24th, 2024 - Not all gamma-ray bursts come from supernovae. Gamma rays are a broad category of high-energy photons, including everything with more energy than an X-ray. While they are often created by processes like radioactive decay, few astronomical events produce them in sufficient quantities that they can be detected when the radiation originates in another galaxy. That said, the list is larger than one, which means detecting gamma rays doesn't mean we know what event produced them. At lower energies, ... [Read More]

Apr 24th, 2024 - NASA: Saturn moon Enceladus is able to host life – it's time for a new mission Saturn has 146 confirmed moons – more than any other planet in the solar system – but one called Enceladus stands out. It appears to have the ingredients for life. From 2004 to 2017, Cassini – a joint mission between NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency – investigated Saturn, its rings and moons. Cassini delivered spectacular findings . Enceladus, only 313 miles ... [Read More]

Apr 24th, 2024 - The venerable Hubble Space Telescope is like a gift that keeps on giving. Not only is it still making astronomical discoveries after more than thirty years in operation. It is also making discoveries by accident! Thanks to an international team of citizen scientists, with the help of astronomers from the European Space Agency (ESA) and some machine learning algorithms, a new sample of over one thousand asteroids has been identified in Hubble's archival data. The methods used represent a new ... [Read More]

Apr 24th, 2024 - Planetary nebula are some of nature's most stunning visual displays. The name is confusing since they're the remains of stars, not planets. But that doesn't detract from their status as objects of captivating beauty and intense scientific study. Like all planetary nebula , the Southern Ring Nebula is the remnant of a star like our sun. As these stars age, they will eventually become red giants , expanding and shedding layers of gas out into space. Eventually, the red giant becomes a white ... [Read More]

Apr 23rd, 2024 - Mars may be a cold, desolate place, but it's a planet packed with secrets. One of the most intriguing mysteries of Mars has been swirling around the puzzling presence of methane gas. This gas , mostly produced by living organisms on Earth, has NASA's Curiosity rover sniffing around in Mars' Gale Crater. Mars methane behavior This Martian methane has an erratic, unpredictable behavior that defies current scientific understanding. It appears at night within Gale Crater, only to vanish during the ... [Read More]

Apr 23rd, 2024 - The universe's early galaxies were less chaotic and developed much faster than previously thought, according to new research looking back more than ten billion years in time. An international team of astronomers led by Durham University, UK, has used the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to find evidence of bar formation when the universe was only a few billion years old. This latest research is published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society . Bars are elongated ... [Read More]

Apr 23rd, 2024 - Astronomers have found some hot magnetized gas swirling around our galaxy's center. Something is alight in Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), the supermassive black hole in the heart of our Milky Way galaxy . In a multi-institutional study, astronomers have created the first three-dimensional visualization of a high-energy flare from Sgr A*. This accomplishment, achieved using data collected by the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA), provides distinctive insights into the turbulent ... [Read More]

Apr 23rd, 2024 - In celebration of the 34th anniversary of the launch of NASA's legendary Hubble Space Telescope on April 24, astronomers took a snapshot of the Little Dumbbell Nebula (also known as Messier 76, M76, or NGC 650/651) located 3,400 light-years away in the northern circumpolar constellation Perseus. The photogenic nebula is a favorite target of amateur astronomers. M76 is classified as a planetary nebula , an expanding shell of glowing gases that were ejected from a dying red giant star. The star ... [Read More]

Apr 23rd, 2024 - For the first time since November 2023, NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft has started transmitting useful data back to Earth about the status and functionality of its onboard systems.  The mission team is now preparing for the spacecraft to resume sending back scientific data. Voyager 1, along with its sibling Voyager 2, are the only spacecraft to venture into interstellar space . Malfunction in Voyager's computers Voyager 1 had ceased transmitting intelligible science and engineering data on ... [Read More]

Apr 23rd, 2024 - Sign up for CNN's Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more . Close flybys of Io, one of Jupiter's moons and the most volcanically active world in our solar system, have revealed a lava lake and a towering feature called "Steeple Mountain" on the moon's alien surface. NASA's Juno spacecraft, which first arrived to study Jupiter and its moons in 2016, flew within roughly 930 miles (1,500 kilometers) of the lava ... [Read More]