NASA’s long-running Voyager 1 spacecraft has entered a new region at the edge of the solar system and is close to exiting it forever. Scientists have dubbed this region the “magnetic highway” and it’s the last stop before interstellar space, or the space between stars. Voyager 1 and its twin Voyager 2 launched 35 years…
NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity has detected several simple carbon-based organic compounds on Mars, but it remains unclear whether they were formed via Earthly contamination or whether they contain only elements indigenous to the planet. Speaking at the American Geophysical Union annual meeting in San Francisco, Curiosity mission leaders also said that the compound perchlorate—identified previously…
An international team of researchers studying the characteristics of the protoplanetary disk of the star UX Tauri A, have determined that its dust particles are large in size and non-spherical in shape. This exciting result shows that these dust grains are colliding with and adhering to each other, a process that will lead to their…
Caltech physicist Sean Carroll makes the search for the Higgs boson a scientific detective story. At heart is the mystery of the universe.
Messenger spacecraft finds substances similar to tar or coal in craters on planet nearest sun
A hunt for supermassive black holes reveals a monstrous one at the heart of galaxy NGC 1277, which may force theorists to rethink their understanding of black holes.
Astronomers have seen a distant galaxy that blasts away material with two trillion times the energy the sun emits — the biggest such eruption ever seen. That ejection of matter could answer an important question about the universe: why are the black holes in the centers of galaxies so light? Computer models of the early…
Researchers from NASA and the Department of Energy have demonstrated a nuclear reactor that could power spaceflight. It’s nowhere near as powerful as NASA’s conceptual antimatter engine–the Demonstration Using Flattop Fissions (DUFF) experiment produces just 24 watts of electricity. The researchers used a heat pipe to cool a small nuclear reactor and power a Stirling…
The hiding spots for the particles making up dark matter are narrowing, and the answer to this cosmic mystery could come within the next three or four years, scientists say. Dark matter is an elusive substance that is invisible and almost never detected, except by its gravitational pull. Yet astronomers say it likely makes up…
Within supersized alien versions of Earth, a common transparent ceramic may become a flowing liquid metal, perhaps granting those distant worlds magnetic fields to shield life from harmful radiation, researchers say. Among the hundreds of extrasolar planets, or exoplanets, that astronomers have discovered in recent years are so-called “super-Earths,” which are rocky planets like Earth…