The Space Shuttle may have taken its final, valedictory tour across the United States, but that’s no reason to think that our exploration of the heavens is over. The Space Race — both in terms of manned travel and remote sensing expeditions — is as competitive now as during the days of Sputnik. Some new…
Nasa’s Curiosity rover has found soil on Mars to be similar to Hawaii’s after sifting and scanning its first sample on the Red Planet. The robot’s CheMin instrument shook out fine particles of soil and fired X-rays at them to determine their composition. These sandy samples should give clues about Mars’ recent geological history. As…
After having launched the space rover Curiosity to Mars, researchers at NASA are now planning to send people to the red planet. Work has begun at Michoud Assembly Facility to find ways by which Mars could be made a reachable planet. It has been reported that the Boeing engineers have been given the responsibility to…
An epic battle between paintballs and a giant asteroid could one day save the Earth from an apocalyptic space rock impact. The novel asteroid-deflecting scheme proposes that a cloud of paintballs shot into space could knock a dangerous asteroid off a collision course with Earth. Sung Wook Paek, an MIT graduate student, says a spacecraft…
One of the lowest mass supermassive black holes ever observed in the middle of a galaxy has been identified, thanks to NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and several other observatories. The host galaxy is of a type not expected to harbor supermassive black holes, suggesting that this black hole, while related to its supermassive cousins, may…
Stars ripped from their home galaxies as they collide with other galaxies can get slung into giant invisible cocoons of dark matter, researchers say, which might explain mysterious radiation pervading the sky. These findings suggest the halos of dark matter surrounding galaxies are not completely dark after all, but contain a small number of stars,…
The center of our galaxy, as seen by the powerful Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) instrument in northern Chile, has been captured in a digital image that represents the largest catalog of the stars there to date, some 84 million of them (10 times more than earlier catalogs). The original image covers…
The European Space Agency has approved the first of its small science missions. Don’t let the description fool you, there is nothing small about the goals of Cheops. It’s a step towards finding habitable planets
Blasting over two million lights years from the centre of a distant galaxy is a supersonic jet of material that looks strikingly similar to the afterburner flow of a fighter jet, except in this case the jet engine is a supermassive black hole and the jet material is moving at nearly the speed of light….
NASA astronomers have discovered a stunning trend in galaxy evolution, according to a report from the space agency. The stunning trend in galaxy evolution goes back 8 billion years, say astronomers who looked at numerous galaxies through the Keck telescopes and NASA’s Space Telescope. “Astronomers thought disk galaxies in the nearby universe had settled into…