What goes up must come down, and earlier this week yet another of SpaceX’s Starships, the biggest and most powerful type of rocket ever built, came back down to Earth in spectacular fashion. In the sky above the Indian Ocean, it exploded.
A new study of the Gobi Wall in the Gobi highland desert of Mongolia reveals a multifunctional role beyond defense; data from the James Webb Space Telescope is bringing physicists closer to resolving the Hubble tension; and a U.S.-based team of astronomers stumbled on a new dwarf planet in the outer solar system while searching for Planet Nine.
For years, the commercial space sector has been abuzz about the prospect of satellite “super constellations” in Earth orbit. These satellites would provide everything from communications and navigation to broadband internet services.
A trio of scientists from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Université de Lyon, and Arizona State University, respectively, has found that a likely reason flat pancake-like volcanoes form on Venus’ surface is the planet has an elastic lithosphere and volcanoes that emit dense lava.
The Federal Aviation Administration is demanding an accident investigation into this week’s out-of-control Starship flight by SpaceX.
A small team of planetary scientists, astrophysicists and space flight researchers affiliated with several institutions in the U.S. and one in France has made the first direct detection of atmospheric sputtering on Mars.
Asteroids are the ancient remnants of our solar system’s birth, rocky fragments that never formed into planets. Most of these celestial wanderers inhabit the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, where Jupiter’s immense gravitational influence prevents them from assembling into a single world. Ranging from house-sized boulders to Ceres, a dwarf planet nearly 1,000 kilometers across, asteroids preserve pristine records of the early solar system’s composition and conditions.
Lunar exploration is entering a new era. Long after the Apollo missions, a renewed international interest comes with ambitious plans for a long-term presence on the moon. NASA’s Artemis program is leading efforts to return humans to the lunar surface, with Artemis III aiming to land astronauts near the moon’s South Pole as early as 2026.
In the hunt for exoplanets, many seek out habitable worlds. There’s comfort in discovering planets that remind us of home—ones at a perfect distance from their host star, with oceans of water covering their surfaces and breathable atmospheres.
It’s an evocative idea that has long bedeviled scientists: a huge and mysterious planet is lurking in the darkness at the edge of our solar system, evading all our efforts to spot it.
The process of necrosis, a form of cell death, may represent one of the most promising ways to change the course of human aging, disease and even space travel, according to a new study by researchers at UCL, drug discovery company LinkGevity and the European Space Agency (ESA).
In late 2020, a female coastal wolf collared for a study on predation patterns unexpectedly died in southeastern Alaska.
China on Thursday launched a space probe on the country’s first mission to retrieve samples from an asteroid and bring them home for research, the Xinhua state news agency reported.
In 2015, a piece of equipment at an observatory in the US moved one quintillionth (10-18) of a meter. This tiny movement was the first recorded event of gravitational waves. And it helped confirm Einstein’s theory of general relativity.
The butterfly effect suggests that small changes in a system can have a large impact on eventual outcomes. One metaphor used to illustrate this concept is a butterfly flapping its wings only to cause a hurricane across the ocean. While meteorologists’ current cause-and-effect understanding of weather isn’t this granular, researchers are actively investigating how changes in temperature, rainfall, wind patterns, etc. can impact weather phenomena halfway across the world.
A series of experiments led by Southwest Research Institute’s Dr. Ujjwal Raut support spectral data recently collected by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) that found evidence that the icy surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa is constantly changing. Europa’s surface ice is crystallizing at different rates in different places, which could point to a complex mix of external processes and geologic activity affecting the surface.
The search for extraterrestrial life has long gone back and forth between scientific curiosity, public fascination and outright skepticism. Recently, scientists claimed the “strongest evidence” of life on a distant exoplanet—a world outside our solar system.
Nature categorizes particles into two fundamental types: fermions and bosons. While matter-building particles such as quarks and electrons belong to the fermion family, bosons typically serve as force carriers—examples include photons, which mediate electromagnetic interactions, and gluons, which govern nuclear forces.
Astronomers from the International Center for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), in collaboration with international teams, have made a startling discovery about a new type of cosmic phenomenon.
The origin of lithium (Li), the third element of the periodic table, has long been shrouded in mystery. This element, commonly found in cosmic rays as two stable isotopes, 6Li and 7Li, is crucial to understanding the origins of the universe and the evolution of its chemical elements.
