It’s amazing to sometimes ponder how the universe came into existence. Most of the physical, chemical, and kinetic forces behind the formation of stars, planets, and other heavenly bodies are beyond our comprehension. However, what we have managed to understand over years of observation and study is that a galaxy is primarily built through collisions ...
Chinese scientists are building the world’s most powerful widefield survey telescope of its class in the northern hemisphere near the “Mars Camp” in Qinghai Province. Construction of the telescope is due to be completed by 2022 and it will begin surveying the night sky around 2023. Scientists hope its panoramic view will lead to new ...
Since its discovery in 2017, an air of mystery has surrounded the first known interstellar object to visit our solar system, an elongated, cigar-shaped body named ‘Oumuamua (Hawaiian for “a messenger from afar arriving first”). A new scenario based on computer simulations accounts for all of the observed characteristics of the first known interstellar object ...
In 2015, the Obama administration signed the U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act (CSLCA, or H.R. 2262) into law. This bill was intended to “facilitate a pro-growth environment for the developing commercial space industry” by making it legal for American companies and citizens to own and sell resources that they extract from asteroids and off-world ...
An international team of researchers has found that neon inside a certain massive star can eat so many electrons in the core, a process called electron capture, that it causes the star to collapse into a neutron star and produce a supernova. The researchers were interested in studying the final fate of stars within a ...
Astronomers have found the best evidence for the perpetrator of a cosmic homicide: a black hole of an elusive class known as “intermediate-mass,” which betrayed its existence by tearing apart a wayward star that passed too close. Weighing in at about 50,000 times the mass of our Sun, the black hole is smaller than the ...
Five years ago, NASA’s New Horizons flyby returned with up-close photos of Pluto. They were the first we’d seen of the dwarf planet that are non-pixelated. Pluto has been an enigma since its discovery in 1930, but seeing it up close gave rise to more questions than answers. Far from what scientists imagined, the mysteries ...
Scientists have often been baffled by Fast Radio Bursts (FRB), radio signals that are just milliseconds in length that blip all over the galaxy. Interestingly, these FRBs even outshine radio pulsars, even though they are million times farther away than the latter. Dozens of theories have been proposed to explain the phenomenon, including being triggered ...
Eight and a half years into its grand tour of the solar system, NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft was ready for another encounter. It was Jan. 24, 1986, and soon it would meet the mysterious seventh planet, icy-cold Uranus. Over the next few hours, Voyager 2 flew within 50,600 miles (81,433 kilometers) of Uranus’ cloud tops, collecting ...
Planetary defense researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) continue to validate their ability to accurately simulate how they might deflect an Earth-bound asteroid in a study that will be published in the American Geophysical Union journal Earth and Space Science. The study, led by LLNL physicist Tané Remington, also identified sensitivities in the code ...
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