An asteroid that could level a city now has a 3.1-percent chance of striking Earth in 2032, according to NASA data released Tuesday—making it the most threatening space rock ever recorded by modern forecasting.
More pocked with craters than any other object in our solar system, Jupiter’s outermost and second-biggest Galilean moon, Callisto, appears geologically unremarkable. In the 1990s, however, NASA’s Galileo spacecraft captured magnetic measurements near Callisto that suggested that its ice shell surface—much like that of Europa, another moon of Jupiter—may encase a salty, liquid water ocean.
The European Space Agency (ESA) is ready to guide the ESA/NASA Solar Orbiter spacecraft through its closest encounter with Venus so far.
In 1974, science fiction author Larry Niven wrote a murder mystery with an interesting premise: Could you kill a man with a tiny black hole? I won’t spoil the story, though I’m willing to bet most people would argue the answer is clearly yes. Intense gravity, tidal forces, and the event horizon would surely lead to a messy end. But it turns out the scientific answer is a bit more interesting.
Researchers have announced results from a new search at the European X-ray Free Electron Laser (European XFEL) Facility at Hamburg for a hypothetical particle that may make up the dark matter of the universe. The experiment is described in a study published in Physical Review Letters.
The giant-impact hypothesis posits that billions of years ago a Mars-sized body named Theia collided with the early Earth.
Galaxies, planets, black holes: to most people, everything about our Universe sounds and feels enormous. But while it’s true that much of what happens millions of light years away is large, there are also processes happening at the quantum end of the scale. That’s the branch of science which explains how nature works at very small scales—smaller than atoms. At this level, things behave in surprising ways.
Perseverance’s drives over the last few weeks have doubled back several times. Why such an unconventional route? Team scientists have been delighted to find new kinds of rocks that could be the oldest ever found on Mars and are eager to collect samples.
Lobster-eye satellite Einstein Probe captured the X-ray flash from a very elusive celestial pair. The discovery opens a new way to explore how massive stars interact and evolve, confirming the unique power of the mission to uncover fleeting X-ray sources in the sky. The work is published on the arXiv preprint server and forthcoming in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Astronomers have peered through the atmosphere of a planet beyond the solar system, mapping its 3D structure for the first time. By combining all four telescope units of the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT), they found powerful winds carrying chemical elements like iron and titanium, creating intricate weather patterns across the planet’s atmosphere.
An international team of engineers and space scientists has used a variety of assumptions, techniques, and math principles to calculate the energy requirements for using moon dust to create rocket fuel. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the group outlines all the factors and processes that would be involved in converting regolith to fuel and moving it to a space-based location for filling up a starship.
We all know that asteroids are out there, that some of them come dangerously close to Earth, and that they’ve struck Earth before with catastrophic consequences. The recent discovery of asteroid 2024 YR4 reminds us of the persistent threat that asteroids present. There’s an organized effort to find dangerous space rocks and determine how far away they are and where their orbits will take them.
The “needle in the haystack” discovery of a powerful explosion from a mysterious unknown object outside our galaxy has excited astronomers.
A recent study by Dr. Albert Jambon and his colleagues, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, revealed the presence of meteoric iron in Early Iron Age ornaments in Poland.
One of the tiniest building blocks of the universe has a weigh-in problem, and Ashutosh Kotwal is determined to get to the bottom of it.
The Apennine brown bear, also known as the Marsican brown bear (Ursus arctos marsicanus), is a unique and critically endangered subspecies of brown bear found only in the remote and rugged Apennine Mountains of central Italy.
A team of top astronomers including Dr. William Alston, Senior Lecturer in Data Science at the University of Hertfordshire’s Center of Astrophysics, has detected unprecedented periodic X-ray pulses from the supermassive black hole 1ES 1927+654, located approximately 270 million light-years away.
An overnight SpaceX launch planned for early Saturday will use a booster that’s already flown to space 25 times.
How’s your weekend? Have you read about the muscular neutrino? It’s so great. This week, we also reported on male stick insects losing their reproductive function. Researchers are seeking cheaper approaches to creating a technology described by Scotty in “Star Trek IV.” And physicists explored the creation of a singularity-free black hole through pure gravity. Additionally, although I don’t want to swamp you with physics news, some theoreticians found evidence of two arrows of time in the quantum realm. And the complexity of birds’ brains evolved independently from mammals.
In 1862, Charles Darwin predicted the existence of a moth with a long tongue based on a comet orchid’s nectar spurs. This was confirmed in 1903 with the discovery of a long-tongued hawkmoth, illustrating morphological trait matching in nature.
