As it turns out, Mars and Earth may be more similar than previously thought in one momentous way: Mars appears to have plate tectonics —giant pieces of the planet’s crust that move, break apart and smash into each other, forming such features as mountains, canyons and volcanoes — and experiences earthquakes, according to a new…
After a full week on the Red Planet, NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity is celebrating with a little rest and relaxation. The 1-ton rover began beaming home photos and testing out its 10 science instruments almost immediately after its dramatic landing on Mars on the night of Aug. 5. But Curiosity is now in the middle…
In 2010, observers reported the most massive stars ever seen, exceeding what many astronomers thought was a ceiling around 150 times the mass of our sun. The most flagrant violator had about twice the legal limit. The heavyweight champs resided 160,000 light-years from Earth in Radcliffe 136, a dense star cluster within the Large Magellanic…
An international team of researchers have developed a new technique to measure dark matter, using a state-of-the-art simulation of the Milky Way to test their mass-measuring method before applying it to real data. This threw up a number of surprises: they noticed that standard techniques used over the past twenty years were biased, always tending…
The largest 3D map yet of the universe’s huge galaxies and bright black holes may serve as a springboard toward solving some of astronomy’s greatest mysteries, its creators say. The map uses new data to reveal the locations of more than a million galaxies over a total volume of 70 billion cubic light-years. David Schlegel…
Curiosity, the largest and most advanced spacecraft ever sent to another planet, stuck its extraordinary landing in triumphant and flawless fashion, and is poised to begin its pioneering, two-year hunt for the building blocks of life — signs that Earth’s creatures may not be not alone in the universe. NASA’s $2.5-billion mission involved the work…
Billions of times the mass of our own sun, so-called massive black holes present a baffling mystery with clues hidden at the very dawn of existence.
Last year, astronomers discovered a quiescent black hole in a distant galaxy that erupted after shredding and consuming a passing star. Now researchers have identified a distinctive X-ray signal observed in the days following the outburst that comes from matter on the verge of falling into the black hole. This tell-tale signal, called a quasi-periodic…
At 10:31 p.m. PDT on Aug. 5, after nearly nine months of travel, NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory mission (with a rover named Curiosity) will arrive at the Red Planet. The $2.5 billion rover will begin a two-year quest to explore the interior of Mars’ Gale Crater and hunt for evidence of an ancient ocean there….
The Higgs boson-like particle whose discovery was announced on 4 July looks significantly more certain to exist. The particle has been the subject of a decades-long hunt as the last missing piece of physics’ Standard Model, explaining why matter has mass. Now one Higgs-hunting team at the Large Hadron Collider report a “5.9 sigma” levels…