The surviving core of a gas giant has been discovered orbiting a distant star by University of Warwick astronomers, offering an unprecedented glimpse into the interior of a planet. The planetary core, which is the same size as Neptune in our own solar system, is believed to be a gas giant that was either stripped ...
On May 29, 2020, a family of sunspots — dark spots that freckle the face of the Sun, representing areas of complex magnetic fields — sported the biggest solar flare since October 2017. Although the sunspots are not yet visible (they will soon rotate into view over the left limb of the Sun), NASA spacecraft ...
Astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope are finding that planet formation is tough in the rough-and-tumble central region of the massive, crowded star cluster Westerlund 2. Located 20,000 light-years away, Westerlund 2 is a unique laboratory to study stellar evolutionary processes because it’s relatively nearby, quite young, and contains a large stellar population. A 3-year ...
Sometime in 2020, NASA will launch a mission to Mars that is scheduled to land the Perseverance rover on the red planet by the following year. The mission is aimed at exploring the ancient environment of Mars and researching its geological processes as well as determining its past habitability. The rover will be carrying NASA’s ...
With the launch period for NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover opening in 14 weeks, final preparations for the spacecraft continue at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. In the past week, the assembly, test, and launch operations team completed important milestones, fueling the descent stage — also known as the sky crane — and attaching ...
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 ...
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 ...
It is already hard to believe that there is ice on Mercury, where daytime temperatures reach 400°C, or 750°F. Now, an upcoming study says that the Vulcan heat on the planet closest to the S°un likely helps make some of that ice. As with Earth, asteroids delivered most of Mercury’s water, the scientific consensus holds. ...
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover has captured its highest-resolution panorama yet of the Martian surface. Composed of more than 1,000 images taken during the 2019 Thanksgiving holiday and carefully assembled over the ensuing months, the composite contains 1.8 billion pixels of Martian landscape. The rover’s Mast Camera, or Mastcam, used its telephoto lens to produce the panorama; ...
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