In 1968, Apollo 8 realised the 2,000-year-old dream of a Roman philosopher
Half a century of Christmases ago, the NASA space mission Apollo 8 became the first manned craft to leave low Earth orbit, atop the unprecedentedly powerful Saturn V rocket, and head out to...
View ArticleNASA: Icy object past Pluto looks like reddish snowman
A NASA spacecraft 4 billion miles from Earth yielded its first close-up pictures Wednesday of the most distant celestial object ever explored, depicting what looks like a reddish snowman.
View ArticleWhy do some people believe the Earth is flat?
If you type 'flat Earth' into Google, you'd be joining a group of people that have helped to triple the search term over the last couple of years. In fact, a recent YouGov poll found that only around...
View ArticleThree dark fields for Euclid's deep survey
Scientists in the Euclid Consortium have selected three extremely dark patches of the sky that will be the subject of the mission's deepest observations, aiming at exploring faint and rare objects in...
View ArticleImage: X-ray serendipity
The purple lines and blotches scattered across this image show something incredible: all of the X-ray sources that were serendipitously detected—that is, not intentionally targeted—by ESA's XMM-Newton...
View ArticleRussia launches space telescope (Update)
Russia launched a space telescope Saturday from the cosmodrome in Baikonur, Kazakhstan, in a joint mission with Germany intended to map X-rays across the sky and replace a project lost in January.
View ArticleGaia starts mapping the galactic bar in the Milky Way
The second release of data from the Gaia star-mapping satellite, published in 2018, has been revolutionising many fields of astronomy. The unprecedented catalogue contains the brightness, positions,...
View ArticlePlasma flow near sun's surface explains sunspots, other solar phenomena
For 400 years people have tracked sunspots, the dark patches that appear for weeks at a time on the sun's surface. They have observed but been unable to explain why the number of spots peaks every 11...
View ArticleIce fossils found in meteorite
A team of researchers from Japan, China and the U.K. has found evidence of ice fossils on the surface of a meteorite. In their paper published in the journal Science Advances, the group describes their...
View ArticleNew device in New Mexico turns back clock on astronomy
A newly forged steel instrument that can pinpoint the path of stars and planets across the night sky using the naked eye is a throwback to the years just before the advent of telescopes, returning...
View ArticleThe riddle of the heavenly bursts
This cosmic lightning storm is happening all around us. Somewhere in the earthly sky, there is a pulse that flashes and extinguishes in the next moment. These bursts, which must be measured with radio...
View ArticleNASA selects four possible missions to study the secrets of the solar system
NASA has selected four Discovery Program investigations to develop concept studies for new missions. Although they're not official missions yet and some ultimately may not be chosen to move forward,...
View ArticleAsteroid Ryugu likely link in planetary formation
The solar system formed approximately 4.5 billion years ago. Numerous fragments that bear witness to this early era orbit the sun as asteroids. Around three-quarters of these are carbon-rich C-type...
View ArticleOrigins of Uranus' oddities explained by Japanese astronomers
The ice giant Uranus' unusual attributes have long puzzled scientists. All of the planets in the solar system revolve around the sun in the same direction and in the same plane, which astronomers...
View ArticleA new theorem predicts that stationary black holes must have at least one...
Black holes, regions in space with such an intense gravitational field that no matter or radiation can escape from them, are among the most mysterious and fascinating cosmological phenomena. Over the...
View ArticleNew tricks from old data: Astronomer uses 25-year-old Hubble data to confirm...
Fritz Benedict has used data he took over two decades ago with Hubble Space Telescope to confirm the existence of another planet around the Sun's nearest neighbor, Proxima Centauri, and to pin down the...
View ArticleObservatories around the solar system team up to study sun's influence
At the heart of understanding our space environment is the knowledge that conditions throughout space—from the sun to the atmospheres of planets to the radiation environment in deep space—are connected.
View ArticleDiscovered: Remnant of ancient globular cluster that's 'the last of its kind'
A team of astronomers including Carnegie's Ting Li and Alexander Ji discovered a stellar stream composed of the remnants of an ancient globular cluster that was torn apart by the Milky Way's gravity 2...
View ArticleHollow porphyrinic nanospheres
Famous Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí once said, "Anything created by human beings is already in the great book of nature." Among different man-made architectures and art, spherical structures and...
View ArticleEarth may have captured a stray 1960s-era rocket booster
Earth has captured a tiny object from its orbit around the sun and will keep it as a temporary satellite for a few months before it escapes back to a solar orbit. But the object is likely not an...
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