Last summer the last Space Shuttle took its last space flight, but last week it took its last worldly one. It ended a generation’s era of space marvel, which turned out to take a very different path from that of the previous generation. During the 1950s and 1960s, space exploration was primarily a proxy for…
Microorganisms that crashed to Earth embedded in the fragments of distant planets might have been the sprouts of life on this one, according to new research from Princeton Univ., the Univ. of Arizona and the Centro de Astrobiología in Spain. The researchers report in the journal Astrobiology that under certain conditions there is a high…
Adam Steltzner is a rocker-turned-NASA engineer who helped take the country’s cool new Curiosity rover to the surface of Mars. “I’m so thankful to Clara Ma for suggesting the name ‘Curiosity.’ It embodies a fundamental attribute that defines us as humans,” Steltzner begins, when asked to explain why Curiosity matters. “Why do we explore? It’s…
Our galaxy — and the nearby Large and Small Magellanic Clouds as well — appears to be surrounded by an enormous halo of hot gas, several hundred times hotter than the surface of the Sun and with an equivalent mass of up to 60 billion Suns, suggesting that other galaxies may be similarly encompassed and…
From time to time, the sun projects billion-ton clouds of charged particles from its scorching surface, surrounded by a solar atmosphere scientists dub corona, into space. Sometimes, these blasts hit the Earth’s magnetic field with a high potential for wrecking havoc to satellites and communications, and in extreme cases massive electrical power surges. It’s become…
Scientists can’t travel deep space the way Columbus sailed and charted the New World or Lewis and Clark mapped the west. But, researchers at Case Western Reserve University and two partnering institutions have found a possible way to map the spread and structure of the universe, guided by the light of quasars. The technique, combined…
Scientists have discovered the strongest evidence yet for a 13.2-billion-year old galaxy, a finding that provides a key piece of information about the universe’s early childhood. “This is the most distant (galaxy) identified with high confidence,” astronomer Wei Zheng, with Johns Hopkins University, told Discovery News. “If our current universe is a man of 70…
In an effort to better understand how life started on Earth, researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory are cooking up icy concoctions of organisms (carbon-bearing molecules) then zapping them with lasers. The JPL crew’s experiments also provide the first direct look at the organic chemistry that takes place in the chilly regions of our solar…
The Dark Energy Camera, a $40-million piece of equipment that represents a pinnacle of astronomical research, is now peering into the reddest reaches of the universe from its new home in Chile, and has seen “first light,” said Joshua Frieman, director of the survey. “That’s a major milestone,” Frieman told the Los Angeles Times in…
The highest-resolution camera ever built has begun its quest to pin down the mysterious stuff that makes up nearly three-quarters of our Universe. The Dark Energy Survey’s 570-million-pixel camera will scan some 300 million galaxies in the coming five years. The goal is to discover the nature of dark energy, which is theorized to be…