While a single plant is capable of fixing inorganic carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air, the entire ecosystem surrounding the plant, including water, other organisms and soil conditions, influences how efficiently the ecosystem exchanges CO2.
When astronomers detected the first long-predicted gravitational waves in 2015, it opened a whole new window into the universe. Before that, astronomy depended on observations of light in all its wavelengths.
Though it’s a cold, dead planet, Mars still has its own natural beauty about it. This image shows us something we’ll never see on Earth.
NASA’s two stuck astronauts took their first spacewalk together Thursday, exiting the International Space Station almost eight months after moving in.
A remarkable sight will appear in the southwestern sky an hour after sunset Saturday evening when Venus appears very close to a thin crescent moon.
Detecting dark matter, the elusive type of matter predicted to account for most of the universe’s mass, has so far proved to be very challenging. While physicists have not yet been able to determine what exactly this matter consists of, various large-scale experiments worldwide have been trying to detect different theoretical dark matter particles.
A newly discovered asteroid has a tiny chance of smacking Earth in 2032, space agency officials said Wednesday.
On NASA’s Artemis II test flight, the first crewed mission under the agency’s Artemis campaign, astronauts will take the controls of the Orion spacecraft and periodically fly it manually during the flight around the moon and back. The mission provides the first opportunity to ensure the spacecraft operates as designed with humans aboard, ahead of future Artemis missions to the moon’s surface.
Weather, climate and hydrometeorology forecasts require accurate surface–atmosphere coupled modeling. This requires the use of proper coupling heights in computing surface turbulent fluxes, or the exchanges of heat, moisture and momentum between the surface of the Earth and the near-surface thin layer of air called the surface layer.
The Artemis program has been NASA’s best chance to get “boots on the moon” again. But with the new US administration taking guidance from tech entrepreneur Elon Musk, who is focused on Mars colonization, will they end up abandoning or pushing back lunar missions?
It took two years for NASA’s OSIRIS-REx space probe to return from asteroid Bennu before dropping off a small capsule as it flew past Earth, which was then recovered in the desert of the U.S. state of Utah on September 24, 2023. Its contents: 122 grams of dust and rock from asteroid Bennu.
Asteroids, small airless bodies within the inner solar system, are theorized to have contributed water and chemical building blocks of life to Earth billions of years ago. Although meteorites on Earth come from asteroids, the combination of exposure to moisture in the atmosphere and to an uncontrolled biosphere means that interpreting the data from them is challenging.
Our home planet is bombarded with particles from outer space all the time. And while we are mostly familiar with the rocky meteorites originating from within our solar system that create fascinating shooting stars in the night sky, it’s the smallest particles that help scientists to understand the nature of the universe.
Using the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), astronomers from the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC) and elsewhere have observed an ultra-diffuse galaxy known as FCC 224. Results of the observational campaign, published Jan. 18 on the arXiv pre-print server, provide important insights into the properties of this galaxy and its globular cluster system.
US President Donald Trump said Tuesday that Elon Musk’s company SpaceX will “soon” begin a mission to repatriate two American astronauts who have been stranded for months on the International Space Station.
Scientists have studied the moon’s surface for decades to help piece together its complex geological and evolutionary history. Evidence from the lunar maria (dark, flat areas on the moon filled with solidified lava) suggested that the moon experienced significant compression in its distant past. Researchers suspected that large, arching ridges on the moon’s near side were formed by contractions that occurred billions of years ago—concluding that the moon’s maria has remained dormant ever since.
The fact that the cold, dry Mars of today had flowing rivers and lakes several billion years ago has puzzled scientists for decades. Now, Harvard researchers think they have a good explanation for a warmer, wetter ancient Mars.
Star formation in the early universe was a vigorous process that created gigantic stars. Called Population III stars, these giants were massive, extremely luminous stars that lived short lives, many of which ended when they exploded as primordial supernovae.
Exoplanets have captured the imagination of the public and scientists alike and as the search continues for more, researchers have turned their attention to the evolution of metallicity in the Milky Way. With this answer comes more of an idea about where planets are likely to form in our galaxy.
Even by the standards of Io, the most volcanic celestial body in the solar system, recent events observed on the Jovian moon are extreme.
