Billions of years ago, a young spiral galaxy began to grow in a crowded part of the universe. It pulled in gas and small companion galaxies, slowly building up the bright central region and sweeping spiral arms we see today.
There’s a new space race to the moon, and this time the ambitions are not just to visit but to stay. NASA’s Artemis program aims to establish a long-term human presence on the lunar surface in the 2030s. China, India, Japan and a number of private companies all have lunar mission programs of their own.
If you could take an apple and break it into smaller and smaller parts, you would find molecules, then atoms, followed by subatomic particles like protons and the quarks and gluons that make them up. You might think you hit the bottom, but, according to string theorists, if you keep going to even smaller scales—about a billion billion times smaller than a proton—you will find more: tiny vibrating strings.
A new genetic test has revealed that most of the free-roaming canines in Australia, often labeled “wild dogs,” carry a significant amount of dingo ancestry. A team of Adelaide University researchers from the Australian Center for Ancient DNA and the Environment Institute analyzed more than 300 free-roaming canines across Australia, and found that, on average, just 11.7% of their DNA comes from domestic dogs.
Swimming among the corals of the Great Barrier Reef is a fish that could be a doppelganger for the famous Sesame Street character Mr. Snuffleupagus. This bright orange-red, hairy, long-snouted ghost pipefish is a new species that has been hiding in plain sight for years, often confused with other ghost pipefish.
When an asteroid as big as Mount Everest struck Earth 66 million years ago, it wiped out all non-avian dinosaurs and roughly a third of life on the planet. But many plants survived the devastation. In a new study published in Cell, researchers reveal that the accidental duplications of genomes—a natural phenomenon—might have helped many flowering plants survive some of the most extreme environmental upheavals in Earth’s history.
NASA’s home for experimental flight is welcoming more flyers to its already high-performing fleet as it continues to support science and aeronautics test missions—continuing the legacy of pioneers like Neil Armstrong.
New research reveals that Dante Alighieri’s Inferno wasn’t just a masterpiece of literature: it was a gedankenexperiment in impact physics. From multi-ring craters to shockwaves that reshaped the globe, discover how a 14th-century poet modeled a planetary impact 500 years before the birth of modern meteoritics.
You probably know that Einstein changed the face of physics with his theory of relativity in his twenties. What you may not know is that he spent his later career on a crusade against quantum mechanics, the model that would go on to drive the next century of advances in the field.
The rotor blades that will carry NASA’s next-generation helicopters to new Martian heights broke the sound barrier during March tests at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. Data from the tests, which took place in a special chamber that can simulate environmental conditions on the Red Planet, indicate that the fastest traveling part of the rotor blade, the tips, can be accelerated beyond Mach 1 without breaking apart. Data gathered from 137 test runs will enable engineers to design aircraft capable of carrying heavier payloads, including science instruments.
The most massive black holes in the universe detected by the ripples they make in spacetime were not born directly from collapsing stars, according to a new study. These cosmic giants instead build up through a series of repeated and extremely violent collision events in very densely populated star clusters, an international team of researchers argue.
Astronomers have long known that neutron stars, the crushed cores left behind after massive stars explode, should be scattered throughout the Milky Way galaxy. However, most of them are effectively invisible. A new study published in Astronomy & Astrophysics suggests that NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope could spot them anyway.
Supermassive black holes lurk at the centers of massive galaxies, including our own Milky Way. Puzzlingly, supermassive black holes more than a billion times the mass of the sun appear to exist just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, when the universe was less than 5% of its current age. As interstellar gas spirals towards such black holes, it accelerates to extreme speeds, heats up, and emits intense radiation across the electromagnetic spectrum, creating a “quasar.”
An international team led by researchers at the Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the University of Barcelona (ICCUB) has developed a new method that could significantly improve our understanding of the expansion of the universe and the nature of dark energy.
Four humans recently looped around the moon. Their vessel, an Artemis capsule, was a thin metal shell whose life-support system kept them alive: it provided a carefully balanced atmosphere, a closed water loop, a finite supply of food, and a means for disposing of human waste. The life support was not optional. It was a necessity.
Astronomers using the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope together with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have looked deeply at thousands of young star clusters in four nearby galaxies, studying clusters at different stages of evolution. Their findings show that more massive star clusters emerge more quickly from the clouds they are born in, clearing away gas and filling the galaxy with ultraviolet light. The result gives us a better understanding of star formation in galaxies, as well as how and where planets can form.
In 2024, the Western Australian Museum received a donation. It was a koala skull collected from Moondyne Cave in Margaret River by Lindsay Hatcher, an avid caver. There was something a bit odd about this skull, and we were able to put our finger in it.
The new focus on manned missions to the moon and Mars presents countless pressing challenges, including keeping humans alive in hostile environments. What happens when an astronaut or space tourist has a cardiac emergency millions of miles from the nearest hospital?
A half century after NASA’s Apollo 17 lunar module lifted off the moon’s northeastern near side quadrant, planetary scientists still don’t completely understand when or how our moon first formed. They do agree that it involved a major impactor—an object dubbed Theia by lunar scientists—that likely struck Earth some 4.51 billion years ago. But the estimated size of Theia now ranges from a proto-Mercury-sized object all the way up to an object that was about half the size of present-day Earth.
A new paper from NASA’s Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 project announces that volunteers have essentially doubled the number of known brown dwarfs, with over 3,000 new discoveries made over the past 10 years since the project began. Brown dwarfs are balls of gas the size of Jupiter, less massive than stars. There’s one for every three or four stars near the sun.
