Category Archives: Phys.org

A private lunar lander has captured the first high-definition sunset pictures from the moon.

Stuck in space no more, NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams returned to Earth on Tuesday, hitching a different ride home to close out a saga that began with a bungled test flight more than nine months ago.

The first Landsat series satellite was launched by NASA in the summer of 1972 with the aim of tracking changes in the Earth’s surface. It was followed by 8 more. The last of them, put into orbit in 2021, adds to the extensive list of these systems currently hurdling through space in search of key information for planetary management.

Where do meteorites of different types come from? In a review paper in the journal Meteoritics & Planetary Science, astronomers trace the impact orbit of observed meteorite falls to several previously unidentified source regions in the asteroid belt.

Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), along with complementary data from the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX), have discovered a surprisingly large reservoir of molecular gas in a protocluster of galaxies known as SPT2349-56. This protocluster, located approximately 12 billion light-years away, is a region of the early universe where a cluster of galaxies is just beginning to form.

New Southwest Research Institute-led modeling indicates the main belt asteroid (52246) Donaldjohanson may have formed about 150 million years ago when a larger parent asteroid broke apart; its orbit and spin properties have undergone significant evolution since.

Physicists have measured a nuclear reaction that can occur in neutron star collisions, providing direct experimental data for a process that had previously only been theorized. The study, led by the University of Surrey, provides new insight into how the universe’s heaviest elements are forged—and could even drive advancements in nuclear reactor physics.

The first image from the international SKA Observatory’s telescope in Australia, SKA-Low, has been released today—a significant milestone in its quest to reveal an unparalleled view of our universe.

Florida Tech’s Caldon Whyte is two years into a lengthy universe exploration to earn his Ph.D. in space sciences. After graduating with a Bachelor’s degree in astrobiology in 2023, he’s fascinated by white dwarf stars—the cooling remnants of low-mass stars (e.g., our sun) that have exhausted their nuclear fuel source—and the likelihood of life surviving in their orbits.

There are many home-grown problems on Earth, but there’s still time to worry about bad things arriving from above. The most recent is the asteroid 2024 YR4, which could be a “city killer” if it hits a heavily populated area of our planet in the early years of the next decade.

A recent study has shed new light on the dynamic evolution of solar prominences. By integrating high-resolution observational data from the one-meter New Vacuum Solar Telescope (NVST) with spectral observations from NASA’s Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) satellite, researchers identified distinct dynamic features in different regions of solar prominences, providing new insights into the origin of counterstreaming flows within these structures.

By analyzing the data from Leahy’s atlas of double radio-sources and NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED), Serbian astronomers have explored an X-shaped radio galaxy designated 3C 315. Results of the new study, published March 10 on the arXiv preprint server, shed more light on the properties and morphology of this galaxy.

Europe’s ESO astrophysics agency said Monday that a giant green energy project billed for Chile’s Atacama desert—home to the world’s darkest skies—will spoil its view of the stars and threaten its science mission.

NASA’s two stuck astronauts headed back to Earth with SpaceX on Tuesday to close out a dramatic marathon mission that began with a bungled Boeing test flight more than nine months ago.

For decades, atomic clocks have been the pinnacle of precision timekeeping, enabling GPS navigation, cutting-edge physics research, and tests of fundamental theories. But researchers at JILA, led by JILA and NIST Fellow and University of Colorado Boulder physics professor Jun Ye, in collaboration with the Technical University of Vienna, are pushing beyond atomic transitions to something potentially even more stable: a nuclear clock.

Exploration of the outer solar system may be getting a boost from the Vera Rubin Observatory (VRO). When this gigantic telescope opens its eye later in 2025, it begins a decade-long survey of the ever-changing sky. As part of this time-lapse vision of the cosmos, distant objects in the Kuiper Belt will be among its most challenging targets.

Under the nighttime California sky, NASA’s EZIE (Electrojet Zeeman Imaging Explorer) mission launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at 11:43 p.m. PDT on March 14.

Despite their overall similarities, asteroids are usually pretty distinct from one another. Vesta has a very different spectroscopic profile than Psyche, for example. So it might come as no surprise that another of the main asteroids—Pallas—is in a class all its own except for the 300 or so members of its “family” with similar orbital profiles and spectroscopic lines.

Ingenuity proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that a helicopter can operate on another planet. Over 72 flights, the little quadcopter that could captivated the imagination of space exploration fans everywhere. But, several factors limited it, and researchers at NASA think they can do better.

X-ray astronomy is a somewhat neglected corner of the more general field of astronomy. The biggest names in telescopes, like Hubble and James Webb, don’t even touch that bandwidth. And Chandra, the most capable space-based X-ray observatory to date, is far less well-known. However, some of the most interesting phenomena in the universe can only be truly understood through X-rays, and it’s a shame that the discipline doesn’t garner more attention.