Astrophysicists Publish a ‘Survival Guide’ for Exoplanets
Small, hardy planets packed with dense elements have the best chance of avoiding being crushed and swallowed up when their host star dies, new research…
Cancer Drug Stops Cancer Cells from Repairing Their DNA
According to researchers at Yale Cancer Center, a cancer drug thought to be of limited use possesses a superpower of sorts: It is able to…
Our Moon is Shrinking, Generating Wrinkles and Moonquakes
The Moon is shrinking as its interior cools, getting more than about 150 feet (50 meters) skinnier over the last several hundred million years. Just…
Hubble Image of the Week – Settling Into Old Age
NGC 3384, visible in this image, has many of the features characteristic of so-called elliptical galaxies. Such galaxies glow diffusely, are rounded in shape, display…
Scientists Show Gravitational Waves Leave Detectable Mark
Gravitational waves, first detected in 2016, offer a new window on the universe, with the potential to tell us about everything from the time following…
Potential New Therapies For Untreatable Kidney Disease
The best hope for people with an inherited form of kidney disease that causes kidney failure is dialysis or a kidney transplant. But a study…
Astronomers Reveal Suppressed Star Formation in the Early Universe
Massive clusters of galaxies, some with more mass than a hundred Milky Way galaxies, have been detected from cosmic epochs as early as about three…
Spitzer Reveals Clues to How Ancient Galaxies Lit up the Universe
NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has revealed that some of the universe’s earliest galaxies were brighter than expected. The excess light is a byproduct of the…
Mars Orbiter Reveals Why Martian Full Moon Looks Like Candy
For the first time, NASA’s Mars Odyssey orbiter has caught the Martian moon Phobos during a full moon phase. Each color in this new image…
Scientists Discover 3-Foot-Tall Relative of the Tyrannosaurus Rex
A new relative of the Tyrannosaurus rex – much smaller than the huge, ferocious dinosaur made famous in countless books and films, including, yes, “Jurassic…
Blue Supergiant Stars Shimmer Because of Waves on Their Surface
Blue supergiants are rock ‘n’ roll: they live fast and die young. This makes them rare and difficult to study. Before space telescopes were invented,…
“Journey through an Exploded Star” 3D Interactive Experience
The Smithsonian today made available a new online interactive that allows users to explore a three-dimensional (3D) visualization of the remnants of a supernova, or…
Many More Amphibian Species at Risk of Extinction
Frogs already knew it wasn’t easy being green, but the going just got a lot tougher for the 1,012 additional species of amphibians who have…
NASA’s Dart Mission to Demonstrate Planetary Defense Technique
The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) – NASA’s first mission to demonstrate a planetary defense technique – will get one chance to hit its target,…
Hubble Image of the Week – Distant and Ancient
Dotted across the sky in the constellation of Pictor (The Painter’s Easel) is the galaxy cluster highlighted here by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope: SPT-CL…
Artificial Intelligence Helps Determine What Visual Neurons Like To See
Why do our eyes tend to be drawn more to some shapes, colors, and silhouettes than others? For more than half a century, researchers have…
Hubble Telescope Views Stunning Spiral Galaxy NGC 2903
Few of the universe’s residents are as iconic as the spiral galaxy. These limelight-hogging celestial objects combine whirling, pinwheeling arms with scatterings of sparkling stars,…
New Hubble Telescope View of the Evolving Universe
Astronomers have put together the largest and most comprehensive “history book” of galaxies into one single image, using 16 years’ worth of observations from NASA’s…