NASA’s Lucy spacecraft recently conducted a flyby of its first two asteroids, with the first one being a binary asteroid named Dinkinesh. The term “Dinkinesh” means “marvelous” in the Amharic language, and it turned out […]
Publisher: Viking (December 1, 2020) Language: English ISBN-10: 1984881639 ISBN-13: 978-1984881632 Author: Camilla Pang, PhD An Outsider’s Guide To Humans: What Science Taught Me About What We Do and Who We […]
Alien life could take many different forms, but one possibility is captivating scientists: alien “plants”. What would they look like? And how could we find them? On the Orion arm of the Milky Way galaxy, […]
In June, astronomers reported a disappointing discovery: The James Webb Space Telescope failed to find a thick atmosphere around the rocky planet TRAPPIST-1 C, an exoplanet in one of the most tantalizing planetary systems in […]
Mars, our neighboring planet, has revealed several significant discoveries through space missions and scientific research. Initially thought to be a lush, life-teeming world, Mariner 4’s 1965 mission dispelled this misconception, showing that Mars is a […]
Planet formation is thought to be a messy process, as lots of growing planets end up in unstable orbits, resulting in large collisions like the one that resulted in the Moon’s formation. The messiness […]
An artist’s impression of the Parker Solar Probe near the Sun’s corona. (NASA Goddard/YouTube) NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has broken the record for the fastest human-made object, reaching speeds of 635,266 km/h (394,736 mph) during […]
The enormous, next-generation communications satellite BlueWalker 3 has become one of the brightest objects visible in the night sky, according to new research published today in the journal Nature. While BlueWalker 3 is groundbreaking for […]
Is humanity the sole inhabitant of the cosmos? This age-old question has persisted throughout our history. In the realm of modern astronomy, the inquiry delves into the search for extraterrestrial life. Are we, as a […]
Publisher : Penguin (August 20, 2020) Language : English Pages : 208 ISBN-10 : 0141983418 ISBN-13 : 978-0141983417 The Case Against Reality: How evolution hid the […]
For nearly seven decades, a plasmon known as Pines’ demon has remained a purely hypothetical feature of solid-state systems. Massless, neutral and unable to interact with light, this unusual quasiparticle is reckoned to play a […]
NASA’s endeavor to alter the trajectory of an asteroid has yielded unexpected results. Just shy of a year ago, NASA intentionally directed its Double Asteroid Redirection Test spacecraft (DART) towards Dimorphos, an asteroid located approximately […]
If a book can be delivered at Warp Speed, you won’t be reading it any time soon – you might not even know what “any time” is anymore!
Before the invention of the telescope, astronomers relied on a variety of tools and techniques to observe and study the celestial objects and phenomena. The simplest and the most ancient method was unaided observation with […]
The European Space Agency (ESA) has revealed that a space debris removal mission’s target, a piece of debris called VESPA, was hit by a small unidentified object. This collision resulted in the release of new […]
I am a co-author of this paper, “Science opportunities with solar sailing smallsats,” announcing “Project Sundiver”… offering a wide suite of potential fast interplanetary missions that could accelerate far faster than today’s rockets can manage, by swooping […]
It’s not coming, it’s already here. Robert Heinlein wrote a story called The Year of the Jackpot in which all the shit hits the fan, it wasn’t about climate change, but 2023 is definitely it. […]
Scientists sometimes make bold claims about where their research might lead, but the most weighty assertions are usually scaled back or forgotten entirely as new data becomes available. Several years ago, scientists at Fermilab suggested […]
Some planets cannot hold onto their atmospheres. It’s thought that most of whatever atmosphere Mars may have had was annihilated by the solar wind billions of years ago, even as Earth and Venus held on […]
Proto, a holographic communications startup based in California, has built a system capable of beaming just about anything from one location to another. Okay, maybe not literally—this isn’t Mike Teavee’s unfortunate turn of events at […]
Is this worth pondering as another worry on our plate? A year or so ago astronomers were saying “Don’t worry (much) about Betelgeuse going supernova any time soon,” despite the earlier nerves set off by […]
One planet per orbit—that’s the way all the planets and exoplanets discovered so far operate, but that might not be universal. Scientists analyzing a solar system called PDS 70 say there’s evidence of more than […]
(The SETI Institute has issued a carefully evasive position paper on the topic, essentially saying “we’ll stay in our lane.”) Sure, a majority have already been explained by careful analyses of receding jet engine exhausts […]
Enlarge / Most of the explanations for this phenomenon involve a neutron star, depicted above. These explanations are uniformly terrible. On Wednesday, researchers announced the discovery of a new astronomical enigma. The new object, GPM […]
Enlarge / A light, cheap space telescope design would make it possible to put many individual units in space at once. Astronomers have discovered more than 5,000 planets outside of the solar system to date. […]
Credit: NANOGrav Hello, folks, and welcome back to This Week in Space. Virgin Galactic made its debut commercial flight, and the European Space Agency is prepping its Euclid Space Telescope for launch this weekend. But […]
Enlarge / An artist’s composition of the Milky Way seen with a neutrino lens (blue). IceCube Collaboration/NSF/ESO Scientists with the IceCube Neutrino Observatory have unveiled a striking new image of our Milky Way galaxy as seen […]
There’s something really strange in the center of the Milky Way. The vicinity of a supermassive black hole is a pretty weird place to start with, but in 2020 astronomers found six objects orbiting Sagittarius […]
Cosmic rays showering down on Earth’s atmosphere are the basis of a new wireless alternative to GPS navigation. 2015 Hiroyuki K.M. Tanaka GPS is now a mainstay of daily life, helping us with navigation, tracking, […]
When discussing recently discovered exoplanets, one recurring observation stands out: Earth-sized planets are surprisingly rare among the thousands of confirmed worlds outside our solar system. While super-Earths and gas giants abound, the detection of a […]
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