The James Webb Space Telescope has directly observed the key chemical of carbon dioxide in planets outside of our solar system for the first time, scientists announced Monday.
This week, ALMA researchers reported the discovery of oxygen in the most distant known galaxy. Geologists believe unusual structures in rock in the desert regions of Namibia, Oman and Saudia Arabia may be evidence of an unknown microorganism. And a group of physicists may have generated a tiny charge of electricity using the Earth’s rotational energy. But the biggest story by far is the second release of data from the DESI survey of the universe, which could upend the standard model:
On March 11, NASA launched a new space telescope into orbit to explore the origins of the universe. The mission will use sophisticated software, developed at the Arizona Cosmology Lab at the University of Arizona, to analyze data and help astronomers understand what happened in the first trillionth of a second after the Big Bang.
Three NASA-funded rockets are set to launch from Poker Flat Research Range in Fairbanks, Alaska, in an experiment that seeks to reveal how auroral substorms affect the behavior and composition of Earth’s far upper atmosphere.
Scientists have long sought to determine the age of the moon’s South Pole–Aitken (SPA) basin, the largest and oldest known impact crater on the lunar surface. Recently, a research team led by Prof. Chen Yi from the Institute of Geology and Geophysics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences has dated the formation of the basin to 4.25 billion years ago by analyzing the first-ever rock samples returned from the SPA basin by China’s Chang’e-6 mission.
Somehow, we all know how a warp drive works. You’re in your spaceship and you need to get to another star. So you press a button or flip a switch or pull a lever and your ship just goes fast. Like really fast. Faster than the speed of light. Fast enough that you can get to your next destination by the end of the next commercial break.
Dark energy is a mystery so daunting that it stretches and strains our most robust theories. The universe is expanding, driven by the unknown force that we’ve named Dark Energy. Dark Energy is also accelerating the rate of expansion. If scientists could figure out why, it would open up a whole new avenue of understanding.
A NASA spacecraft will make another close brush with the sun, the second of three planned encounters through the sizzling solar atmosphere.
A terrifying glimpse at one potential fate of our Milky Way galaxy has come to light thanks to the discovery of a cosmic anomaly that challenges our understanding of the universe.
The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory’s (NRL) Narrow Field Imager (NFI) was launched into space aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket as a part of NASA’s Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere (PUNCH) mission on March 11 and deployed from Falcon 9 on March 12.
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features a sparkling spiral galaxy paired with a prominent star, both in the constellation Virgo. While the galaxy and the star appear to be close to one another, even overlapping, they’re actually a great distance apart. The star, marked with four long diffraction spikes, is in our own galaxy. It’s just 7,109 light-years away from Earth. The galaxy, named NGC 4900, lies about 45 million light-years from Earth.
ESA’s Euclid space telescope has been providing valuable data from the depths of space for almost two years. With its help, the largest and most accurate 3D map of the universe to date is to be created, with billions of stars and galaxies. The data from Euclid is analyzed by the international Euclid consortium, which also includes the research teams of Francine Marleau and Tim Schrabback at the University of Innsbruck.
Interstellar objects are among the last unexplored classes of solar system objects, holding tantalizing information about primitive materials from exoplanetary star systems. They pass through our solar system only once in their lifetime at speeds of tens of kilometers per second, making them elusive.
Up for a challenge? If skies are clear, you may be able to complete a rare feat of visual athletics this coming weekend, and follow Venus on its trek from the evening into the morning sky.
Venus will pass between the Earth and sun on Saturday during what’s called an inferior conjunction.
Two different teams of astronomers have detected oxygen in the most distant known galaxy, JADES-GS-z14-0. The discovery, reported in two separate studies, was made possible thanks to the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), in which the European Southern Observatory (ESO) is a partner. This record-breaking detection is making astronomers rethink how quickly galaxies formed in the early universe.
Using the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST), Chinese astronomers have detected a new ultra-faint dwarf galaxy, which turned out to be gas-rich. The finding was reported in a research paper published March 12 on the preprint server arXiv.
The universe has been expanding ever since the Big Bang almost 14 billion years ago, and astronomers believe a kind of invisible force called dark energy is making it accelerate faster.
After the safe return Tuesday of two astronauts left behind for months on the International Space Station, the White House characterized the pair as “stranded” and trumpeted their return as a “rescue.” Those are words that NASA has been resisting for months.
Dark energy makes up roughly 70% of the universe, yet we know nothing about it.
