A warp drive to achieve faster-than-light travel — a concept popularized in television’s Star Trek — may not be as unrealistic as once thought, scientists say. A warp drive would manipulate space-time itself to move a starship, taking advantage of a loophole in the laws of physics that prevent anything from moving faster than light….
A spacecraft orbiting Mars has detected carbon dioxide snow falling on the Red Planet, making Mars the only body in the solar system known to host this weird weather phenomenon. The snow on Mars fell from clouds around the planet’s south pole during the Martian winter spanning 2006 and 2007, with scientists discovering it only…
The answer to the enduring question of the smallest thing in the universe has evolved along with humanity. People once thought grains of sand were the building blocks of what we see around us. Then the atom was discovered, and it was thought indivisible, until it was split to reveal protons, neutrons and electrons inside….
A strange picture of odd, spherical rock formations on Mars from NASA’s Opportunity rover has scientists scratching their heads over what exactly they’re looking at. The new Mars photo by Opportunity shows a close-up of a rock outcrop called Kirkwood covered in blister-like bumps that mission scientists can’t yet explain. At first blush, the formations…
NASA-funded astronomers have, for the first time, spotted planets orbiting sun-like stars in a crowded cluster of stars. The findings offer the best evidence yet that planets can sprout up in dense stellar environments. Although the newfound planets are not habitable, their skies would be starrier than what we see from Earth. The starry-skied planets…
People have dreamed of colonizing the Red Planet for more than a century. USA Today takes a look at NASA’s most recent Mars plan for landing astronauts there about 2035. The first outposts could come after 2060. “Mars has captured the human imagination certainly since people started gazing up at the sky,” says NASA science…
At first glance, the center of the Milky Way seems like a very inhospitable place to try to form a planet. Stars crowd each other as they whiz through space like cars on a rush-hour freeway. Supernova explosions blast out shock waves and bathe the region in intense radiation. Powerful gravitational forces from a supermassive…
New research indicates that life might be able to survive on some of the odder exoplanets discovered so far – from scorching hot worlds with molten surfaces to freezing balls of ice. Habitable planets are usually defined as those where liquid water can exist. But not all exoplanets orbit, like Earth, at a fairly constant…
A pair of detectors that measure minute distortions in images of distant galaxies will probe the riddle of cosmic acceleration.
Mars wasn’t always the Red Planet. Eons ago, it is possible that Mars was as lush as Earth is today. So, what happened? NASA is on the case with this enlightening video of how Mars may have lost its atmosphere. The idea behind the atmospheric “sputtering” Mars may have experienced is fairly simple to understand….