Five Hazards of Human Spaceflight
A human journey to Mars, at first glance, offers an inexhaustible amount of complexities. To bring a mission to the Red Planet from fiction to…
A human journey to Mars, at first glance, offers an inexhaustible amount of complexities. To bring a mission to the Red Planet from fiction to…
FORS2, an instrument mounted on ESO’s Very Large Telescope, has observed the spiral galaxy NGC 3981 in all its glory. The image was captured as…
The explosions of stars, known as supernovae, can be so bright they outshine their host galaxies. They take months or years to fade away, and…
Scientists at Southwest Research Institute studied an unusual pair of asteroids and discovered that their existence points to an early planetary rearrangement in our solar…
On September 9, 2018, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, SDO, saw two lunar transits as the Moon passed in front of the Sun. A transit happens…
Cassini ended its 13-year mission at Saturn on September 15, 2017 when it plunged into the gas giant’s atmosphere, but the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope…
Gravity is so much a part of our daily lives that it is all too easy to forget its awesome power — but on a…
New research shows that phosphorus, which is vital to life but somewhat rare, condensed inside asteroids in the outer Solar System before moving back towards…
Apart from a billion Milky Way stars, ESA’s Gaia spacecraft also observes extragalactic objects. Its automated alert system notifies astronomers whenever Gaia spots a transient…
Bright surface features on the dwarf planet Ceres known as faculae were first discovered by NASA’s Dawn spacecraft in 2015. This mosaic of one such…
The reason Pluto lost its planet status is not valid, according to new research from the University of Central Florida. In 2006, the International Astronomical…
Revealing Solar System Time Capsules, Breaking Engineering Barriers NASA’s Dawn mission is drawing to a close after 11 years of breaking new ground in planetary…
Astronomers using ALMA, with the aid of a gravitational lens, have detected the most-distant galactic “wind” of molecules ever observed, seen when the universe was…
The North Star, Polaris, is a Cepheid variable: one whose mass, age and physical conditions generate periodic oscillations with a period proportional to the star’s…
After snagging a new rock sample on August 9, NASA’s Curiosity rover surveyed its surroundings on Mars, producing a 360-degree panorama of its current location…
Astronomers have used NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory to discover a ring of black holes or neutron stars in a galaxy 300 million light years from…
Wolf 503b, an exoplanet twice the size of Earth, has been discovered by an international team using data from NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope. The find…
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) will host a live-streamed Science Chat at 2 p.m. EDT Friday, September 7, during which experts will talk about the…