New research shows that atmospheric pressure fluctuations that pull gases up from underground could be responsible for releasing subsurface methane into Mars’ atmosphere; knowing when and where to look for methane can help the Curiosity rover search for signs of life.
A team of astronomers have discovered a planet closer and younger than any other Earth-sized world yet identified. It’s a remarkably hot world whose proximity to our own planet and to a star like our sun mark it as a unique opportunity to study how planets evolve.The new planet was described in a new study published this week by The Astronomical Journal.
The Green Bank Telescope has discovered over 250 gaseous clouds being blasted out of the center of the Milky Way into interstellar space. A decade ago, astronomers weren’t aware of this phenomenon. It took years of observations, and some surprising finds, to produce this latest result.
A Neptune-sized planet denser than steel has been discovered by an international team of astronomers, who believe its composition could be the result of a giant planetary clash.
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope caps a successful first year of science, and stunning imagery, with a detailed view of the closest star-forming region to Earth, the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex, resulting in a dynamic image that belies the region’s relative quiet – and practically begs for explanation of what exactly we are looking at.
Saturn’s rings are much younger than scientists once thought, according to new research from Indiana University Professor Emeritus of Astronomy Richard Durisen — and they are not here to stay.
Hubble observed a curious linear feature that was first dismissed as an imaging artifact from the telescope’s cameras. But follow-up observations indicate it is a 200,000-light-year-long chain of young blue stars created in the wake of a runaway black hole.
A liquid nitrogen spray developed by Washington State University researchers can remove almost all of the simulated moon dust from a space suit, potentially solving what is a significant challenge for future moon-landing astronauts.
Curtin University-led research into the durability and age of an ancient asteroid made of rocky rubble and dust, revealed significant findings that could contribute to potentially saving the planet if one ever hurtled toward Earth.
These are Hubble Space Telescope images of two massive clusters of galaxies. The artificially added blue color is translated from Hubble data that captured a phenomenon called intracluster light. This extremely faint glow traces a smooth distribution of light from wandering stars scattered across the cluster. Billions of years ago, the stars were shed from their parent galaxies and now drift through intergalactic space alone.
Astronomers pouring over 200,000 Hubble images have made a ghostly discovery. They uncovered an exceedingly tiny glow in the sky—which does not come from planets, stars, or galaxies. It might be from comet dust inside our solar system reflecting sunlight.
New observations of WASP-39 b reveal a never-before-seen molecule in the atmosphere of a planet — sulfur dioxide — among other details.
In mid-infrared light, the Pillars of Creation appear otherworldly. NASA’S James Webb Space Telescope has delivered a scene that is large and lofty – and appears lit by flickering lanterns.
VLA observations revealed that cosmic rays can play an important role in driving winds that rob galaxies of the gas needed to form new stars. This mechanism may be important in galactic evolution, particularly at earlier times in the history of the universe.
The discovery of a so-called monster black hole that has about 12 times the mass of the sun is detailed in a new Astrophysical Journal research submission, the lead author of which is Dr. Sukanya Chakrabarti, a physics professor at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH).
Webb's first look at Neptune is certainly a stunner! We're getting the clearest view of Neptune's rings in decades. The faint, dustier bands have never been seen in the infrared like we see now. At near-infrared wavelengths, Neptune's methane gas so strongly absorbs red and infrared light that the planet is quite dark, except where high-altitude clouds are present. These methane-ice clouds are prominent as bright streaks and spots in Webb's view.
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope presents a new perspective on 30 Doradus, or the Tarantula Nebula, a region well-known to astronomers studying star formation. Its nickname once came from its resemblance to the spider itself, but in Webb’s view the overall region takes on the appearance of a tarantula’s home—a burrow lined with its own spun silk. The Tarantula Nebula shelters thousands of young and still-forming stars, many revealed by Webb for the first time.
An evocative new image captured by the Gemini North telescope in Hawai‘i reveals a pair of interacting spiral galaxies — NGC 4568 and NGC 4567 — as they begin to clash and merge. These galaxies are entangled by their mutual gravitational field and will eventually combine to form a single elliptical galaxy in around 500 million years. Also visible in the image is the glowing remains of a supernova that was detected in 2020.
The holographic principle is used to describe the expanding universe in de Sitter space. It provides a solution to Einstein's general relativity equation with a positive cosmological constant. The proposed model uses a negative cosmological constant to account for gravity on anti-de Sitter space.
A time travel machine, the $10 billion space observatory is being considered well worth the price tag because it will help answer long-held questions about the big bang and search for signs of alien life, University of Miami astrophysicists maintain.
Astronomy postdoc Valerie Payré is on an international team that discovered the origin of the martian meteorite known as Black Beauty, one of the most-studied meteorites in the world. It may hold clues to the development of Earth and other terrestrial planets and help explain why Earth sustains life when its closest neighbor does not.
The seemingly three-dimensional “Cosmic Cliffs” showcases Webb’s capabilities to peer through obscuring dust and shed new light on how stars form. Webb reveals emerging stellar nurseries and individual stars that are completely hidden in visible-light pictures. This landscape of “mountains” and “valleys” is actually the edge of a nearby stellar nursery called NGC 3324 at the northwest corner of the Carina Nebula. So-called mountains — some towering about 7 light-years high — are speckled with glittering, young stars imaged in infrared light. A cavernous area has been carved from the nebula by the intense ultraviolet radiation and stellar winds from extremely massive, hot, young stars located above the area shown in this image. The blistering, ultraviolet radiation from these stars is sculpting the nebula’s wall by slowly eroding it away. Dramatic pillars rise above the glowing wall of gas, resisting this radiation. The “steam” that appears to rise from the celestial “mountains” is
When our sun exhausts the hydrogen fuel in its core some 5 billion years from now, it will expand to become a red giant, engulfing the inner planets.
A recently discovered, rare and persistent rapid-fire fast radio burst source – sending out an occasional and informative cosmic ping from more than 3.5 billion light years away – helps to reveal the secrets of the broiling hot space between the galaxies. That’s according to an international team of astronomers who published their findings in the journal Nature.
A highly active repeating Fast Radio Burst is raising new questions about the nature of such objects, and also raising doubts about their usefulness as cosmic yardsticks.
Astronomers have searched for extraterrestrial civilizations in planetary systems for sixty years, to no avail. In the paper published by International Journal of Astrobiology, Cambridge University Press, and titled “Migrating extraterrestrial civilizations and interstellar colonization: Implications for SETI and SETA,” Irina K. Romanovskaya proposes that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) may have more chances to become successful when including the search for migrating extraterrestrial civilizations.
Shining only ~300 million years after the Big Bang, it may be home to the oldest stars in the universe, or a supermassive black hole.
Planetary scientist Christopher Edwards and his team will use renewed NASA funding for Mars Science Lab Curiosity Rover project to continue exploring the rock record on the Red Planet.
When the European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft discovered abundant molecular oxygen bursting from comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (67P) in 2015, it puzzled scientists. They had never seen a comet emit oxygen, let alone in such abundance. But most alarming were the deeper implications: that researchers had to account for so much oxygen, which meant reconsidering everything they thought they already knew about the chemistry of the early solar system and how it formed. A new analysis, however, led by planetary scientist Adrienn Luspay-Kuti at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, shows Rosetta’s discovery may not be as strange as scientists first imagined.
Astronomers have used a new technique to confirm a real-life Tatooine, the fictional planet with two suns that was home to Luke Skywalker in “Star Wars.”
The source of Earth’s water has been a longstanding debate and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) scientists think they have the answer—and they found it by looking at rocks from the moon.
The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) has cataloged more galaxies than all other previous three-dimensional redshift surveys combined, measuring 7.5 million galaxies in only seven months since beginning science operations. The US Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory leads DESI, which is installed at Kitt Peak National Observatory, a program of NSF's NOIRLab, on the Nicholas U. Mayall 4-meter Telescope.
Scientists are closer to solving a solar heating puzzle using direct data now that NASA’s Parker Solar Probe (PSP), on which The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) teamed to develop an instrument suite to directly measure particles from the solar wind, has for the first time entered a region never before explored.
Astronomers using Hubble and radio telescopes have found increasing evidence that the black hole near the center of our Milky Way galaxy periodically awakens, captures a star or gas cloud that falls into it, and then releases powerful beams of radiation and particles.
This ethereal image, captured from Chile by the international Gemini Observatory, a Program of NSF's NOIRLab, looks as delicate as a butterfly’s wing. It is, however, a structure known as the Chamaeleon Infrared Nebula, which is located near the center of the mammoth Chamaeleon I dark cloud, one of the nearest star-forming regions in our Milky Way.
The Hubble Space Telescope is taking us on the scenic route through the outer Solar System with crisp new images of the gas giants—Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.
In its first year of operations, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope will join forces with a global collaborative effort to create an image of the area directly surrounding the supermassive black hole at the heart of our Milky Way galaxy.
To understand how the universe formed, astronomers have created AbacusSummit, more than 160 simulations of how gravity may have shaped the distribution of dark matter.
With future space exploration in mind, a Cornell-led team of astronomers has published the final maps of Titan’s liquid methane rivers and tributaries – as seen by NASA’s late Cassini mission – so that may help provide context for Dragonfly’s upcoming 2030s expedition.
New calculations show that a black hole slurping down a star may not have generated enough energy to launch a neutrino.
Since the Perseverance rover landed in Jezero crater on Mars in February, the rover and its team of scientists back on Earth have been hard at work exploring the floor of the crater that once held an ancient lake.
Considered an ultra-hot Jupiter – a place where iron gets vaporized, condenses on the night side and then falls from the sky like rain – the fiery, inferno-like WASP-76b exoplanet may be even more sizzling than scientists had realized.
While black holes and toddlers don't seem to have much in common, they are remarkably similar in one aspect: Both are messy eaters, generating ample evidence that a meal has taken place.
A series of new images reveals that planets form in organic soups — and no two soups are alike.
Transporting a single brick to Mars can cost more than a million British pounds – making the future construction of a Martian colony seem prohibitively expensive.
A spectacular portrait of the galaxy Centaurus A has been captured by astronomers using the Dark Energy Camera mounted on the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile.
What was once the largest solar observatory in the world is now undergoing a transformation to become a one-of-a-kind facility for sharing the wonders of astronomy with people around the globe. Construction work has started to recast the McMath-Pierce Solar Telescope facility at Kitt Peak National Observatory into the NOIRLab Windows on the Universe Center for Astronomy Outreach.
NASA’s Dragonfly mission, which will send a rotorcraft relocatable lander to Titan’s surface in the mid-2030s, has big goals.
New research led by NASA provides a closer look at a nearby star thought to resemble our young Sun.
Watching X-rays flung out into the universe by the supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy 800 million light-years away, Stanford University astrophysicist Dan Wilkins noticed an intriguing pattern.
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