A private lunar lander carrying a drill, vacuum and other experiments for NASA touched down on the moon Sunday, the latest in a string of companies looking to kickstart business on Earth’s celestial neighbor ahead of astronaut missions.
The planet WASP-121b is extreme. It’s a gas giant almost twice as big as Jupiter orbiting extremely close to its star–50 times closer than the Earth does around the sun. WASP-121b is so close to its star that tidal forces have locked its rotation in a “resonance”: the planet always shows the same face to its star, like the moon to the Earth. Therefore, one side of WASP-121b constantly bakes in light whereas the other is in perpetual night. This difference causes huge variations in temperature across the planet. It can be more than 3,000°C on one side and drop 1,500°C on the other.
For a few days in mid-February, headlines around the world buzzed about the potential for an asteroid to hit the Earth in 2023—specifically, asteroid 2024 YR4. The chance of this impact rose to a high of 3.1 percent on Feb. 18.
Ultrahigh Energy Cosmic Rays are the highest-energy particles in the universe, whose energies are more than a million times what can be achieved by humans. But while the existence of UHECRs has been known for 60 years, researchers have not succeeded in formulating a satisfactory explanation for their origin that explains all the observations.
A team of researchers at the George R. Brown School of Engineering and Computing at Rice University has developed an innovative artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled, low-cost device that will make flow cytometry—a technique used to analyze cells or particles in a fluid using a laser beam—affordable and accessible.
Researchers are creating advanced simulations that will provide a deeper understanding of Mars’s climatic history and help to determine whether it was once able to sustain life.
The seven other planets in our solar system will line up in the night sky on Friday evening for a rare alignment called a “planetary parade” that will not happen again until 2040.
If you’ve ever looked at Mars through a telescope, you probably noticed its two polar ice caps. The northern one is made largely of water ice—the most obvious sign that Mars was once a wetter, warmer world. A team of researchers from the German Aerospace Center (DLR) used that ice cap to make surprising discoveries about it and what it tells us about Mars’s interior. The research is published in the journal Nature.
Today, the European Space Agency’s gamma-ray telescope ends its observations. During its 22 years in space, Integral has reshaped our view of the most dramatic events in the universe. The high-energy observatory played a pivotal role in revealing the nature of the cosmic explosions known as gamma-ray bursts and in uncovering the origin of gravitational wave events. Recently, it delivered unique insights into how thermonuclear blasts drive jets in neutron stars and captured the giant flare from an extragalactic magnetar.
When the sun hurled enormous amounts of radiation into space in an explosive eruption on February 22, 2024, the Indian space probe Aditya-L1, launched a few months earlier, was watching closely—and thus captured the first images of such a flare in the lowermost solar atmosphere.
They look like a cross between an otter and a gopher but they taste something like a rabbit or dark meat from turkey. And conservation officials want you to eat as many of them as you can.
Led by Rocket Lab of Long Beach, California, and their partners at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Rocket Lab’s Venus mission will be the first private mission to the planet.
Located 2.5 million light-years away, the majestic Andromeda galaxy appears to the naked eye as a faint, spindle-shaped object roughly the angular size of the full moon. What backyard observers don’t see is a swarm of nearly three dozen small satellite galaxies circling the Andromeda galaxy, like bees around a hive.
Astronauts often experience immune dysfunction, skin rashes, and other inflammatory conditions while traveling in space. A new study published in the journal Cell suggests that these issues could be due to the excessively sterile nature of spacecraft.
Neutron stars are some of the densest objects in the universe. They are the core of a collapsed megastar that went supernova, have a typical radius of 10 km—just slightly more than the altitude of Mt. Everest—and their density can be several times that of atomic nuclei.
At the start of the year, the European Commission established the Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory (CTAO) as a European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC), furthering its mission to become the world’s largest and most powerful observatory for gamma-ray astronomy.
A SpaceX launch Wednesday night sent both a lander and an orbiter on their way to the moon, both on the hunt for ice.
A US company is aiming for its second lunar touchdown after a lander carrying a suite of unique experiments successfully launched aboard a SpaceX rocket on Wednesday.
NASA astronaut Don Pettit used a camera with low light and long duration settings to capture this Jan. 29, 2025, image of the Milky Way appearing beyond Earth’s horizon.
New information is pushing Asteroid 2024 YR4 off of our front pages. Initial estimates gave it a 2.8% chance of striking Earth in 2032. Now, the European Space Agency says the chance of it striking our planet is down to a paltry 0.001%.
