Space

Apr 24th, 2025 - QUICK FACTS ABOUT SATURN How far it is from the sun: 886 million miles (1.4 billion kilometers), on average How big it is: 72,400 miles (116,500 km) across, or almost 10 times the size of Earth. How many moons it has: At least 274 known moons, with more likely to be discovered With its beautiful rings, Saturn may be the most stunning planet in the solar system . It is the sixth planet from the sun and the second-largest planet in the solar system , after Jupiter. Though Saturn is famous for its ... [Read More]

Apr 24th, 2025 - On April 24, 1990, all 24,000 pounds of the Hubble Space Telescope were tucked away inside the Discovery space shuttle when it launched into space. Thirty-five years later, NASA says Hubble has proven to have "opened a new window to the universe," with more than 1.6 million observations to date filled with compelling and surprising images of galaxies, planets and our own solar system.  To celebrate the anniversary milestone, NASA has released stunning photos taken by the telescope in its ... [Read More]

Apr 24th, 2025 - Five years into its mission, NASA and ESA's Solar Orbiter just snapped what might be the crispest, most detailed full-Sun view humanity has ever seen. The shot above—in all its mesmerizing, dull-yellow grandeur—captures our Sun's million-degree corona in ultraviolet light. Taken on March 9, 2025, from about 47.8 million miles (77 million kilometers) away, this image isn't a single pretty picture. In fact, it's a mosaic—stitched together from 200 individual shots of the Sun, ... [Read More]

Apr 24th, 2025 - An international team including astronomers from the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) has announced the discovery of a planet about twice the size of Earth orbiting its star farther out than Saturn is to the sun. These results are another example of how planetary systems can be different from our solar system. "We found a 'super-Earth'—meaning it's bigger than our home planet but smaller than Neptune—in a place where only planets thousands or hundreds of times ... [Read More]

Apr 24th, 2025 - Constant gusts of particles from the sun may be creating water molecules on the moon, a new NASA -led experiment hints. Scientists have detected traces of water molecules — as well as hydroxyl (OH) molecules, a component of water — on the surface of the moon through multiple space missions. The source of this water has long been a mystery, though some theories suggest volcanism, outgassing from deeper in the lunar regolith (the combination of rock and dust on the surface of the ... [Read More]

Apr 24th, 2025 - Astronomers have discovered an exoplanet 140 light-years from Earth which is disintegrating, leaving a 9-million-km-long comet-like tail. For now, the disintegrating world is about the same size as Mercury. It orbits its host star every 30.5 hours at about 3 million km – about 20 times closer than Mercury is to our Sun. The planet's surface is likely made of magma that is boiling off into space. It is evaporating away. The discovery, published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters , was ... [Read More]

Apr 24th, 2025 - The universe's largest structure, the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall, was already a challenge to explain with models of the universe due to its incredibly vast size — and now, using the most powerful blasts of energy in the universe, Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs), astronomers have discovered this structure is even bigger than they realized. Plus, the team even found that parts of the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall are actually closer to Earth than previously suspected. The ... [Read More]

Apr 23rd, 2025 - The exoplanet K2-18b is generating headlines because researchers announced what could be evidence of life on the planet. The JWST detected a pair of atmospheric chemicals that on Earth are produced by living organisms. The astronomers responsible for the results are quick to remind everyone that they have not found life, only chemicals that could indicate the presence of life. The results raise a larger question, though: Will the JWST really ever detect life? The JWST was developed with four ... [Read More]

Apr 23rd, 2025 - On April 7, Uranus passed in front of a distant star located 400 light-years away, giving NASA scientists a rare cosmic alignment in which to investigate the distant ice giant. During the hour-long event, called a stellar occultation, Uranus' atmosphere refracted the star's light, dimming it before blocking it out completely. Though it's counterintuitive, the dimming light provided an opportunity to illuminate aspects of Uranus that are usually difficult to spot. 30 astronomers at 18 ... [Read More]

Apr 23rd, 2025 - Let's turn the sun into a telescope. In fact, we don't have to do any work—we just have to be in the right spot. But how can the sun be a telescope? The sun is not a mirror, but it is a lens. And we understand it's a lens through the magic of gravity. When Einstein developed general relativity , he realized that gravity can strongly bend the path of light—far more than previous calculations using only Newtonian gravity predicted. In fact, one of the first tests of Einstein's theory ... [Read More]

Apr 23rd, 2025 - For decades, astronomers have searched for the universe's missing matter – the normal matter that should exist according to the Big Bang theory, but can't be fully seen. This isn't about dark matter, which constitutes most of the universe's mass. It's about ordinary, visible matter like stars, gas, and galaxies. Even after accounting for everything that can be observed through telescopes, more than half of this matter seemed to be missing. But new research might have solved the mystery. ... [Read More]

Apr 23rd, 2025 - NASA 's Lucy spacecraft has captured its first high-resolution images of an asteroid, revealing a bizarrely shaped 150-million-year-old space rock. The asteroid Donaldjohanson formed when two smaller objects smashed into each other. Donaldjohanson is narrow in the middle with two lobes on either side, like a misshapen peanut with one kernel larger than the other. Lucy flew as close as 600 miles (960 kilometers) — about the width of Montana — from Donaldjohanson on Sunday (April 20), ... [Read More]

Apr 22nd, 2025 - A new University of Kansas survey of distant galaxies using the James Webb Space Telescope reveals never-before-seen star formation and black hole growth at "cosmic noon"—a mysterious epoch 2–3 billion years after the Big Bang, when galaxies like the Milky Way underwent an intense growth spurt. The results of the MIRI EGS Galaxy and AGN (MEGA) survey on the arXiv preprint server and soon will be published by The Astrophysical Journal . According to KU researchers, galaxies were ... [Read More]

Apr 21st, 2025 - Could future civilizations plug into the spin of space-time itself? At the edge of science and imagination lies a question once posed by a Nobel laureate and now revisited with fresh eyes: could we one day power an interstellar civilization using the rotation of black holes? In 1969, physicist Roger Penrose proposed that advanced civilizations might someday harness the immense energy swirling around spinning black holes. Over half a century later, physicist Jorge Pinochet of the Metropolitan ... [Read More]

Apr 21st, 2025 - NEW YORK (AP) — A newly discovered green comet tracked by telescopes has likely broken apart as it swung by the sun, dashing hopes of a naked-eye spectacle . Comet SWAN, hailing from the Oort Cloud beyond Pluto , has been visible through telescopes and binoculars over the past few weeks with its streaming tail, but experts said it may not have survived its recent trip past the sun and is fading fast. "We'll soon be left with just a dusty rubble pile," astrophysicist Karl Battams with the ... [Read More]

Apr 21st, 2025 - NASA's Perseverance rover recently spotted something strange while exploring the dusty slopes of Jezero Crater on Mars. The rover used one of its cameras to snap a photo of the dark, angular rock, which stands out so sharply from its surroundings, and scientists aren't sure what to make of it. Dubbed Skull Hill, this jagged rock has become the latest Martian mystery , and researchers are racing to figure out where it came from. Perseverance encountered the rock while rolling through an area ... [Read More]