The discovery of another moon around Pluto is exciting news for planetary science, but it’s also likely causing some anxiety for the team in charge of New Horizons, a spacecraft set to be the first probe ever to visit the dwarf planet. Researchers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope announced the detection of P5, a tiny…
The equivalent of an MRI of the sun was created by scientists, who studied high-resolution images of the sun’s surface taken by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory showing motions on the sun’s surface caused by convection. The findings challenge our existing explanations of the formation of sunspots and magnetic field generation.
The Hubble Space Telescope has captured images of three odd galaxies that may help scientists solve a 13 billion-year cosmic mystery. The galaxies are so old and faint that astronomers nicknamed them “ghost galaxies” in a description. The objects are among the smallest and faintest galaxies near our own Milky Way galaxy, researchers said. “These…
A mysterious wave discovered in the Milky Way suggests our galaxy is still ringing like a bell from a galactic collision, a crash that possibly occured within the last 100 million years, scientists say. Astronomers discovered that stars north and south of the midplane of the galaxy are distributed differently, suggesting that some recent event…
There’s a strange new brute on the celestial block—the middleweight black hole, a new study says. After nearly three years of spying a superbright object nearly 300 million light-years away, astronomers with NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and SWIFT telescope recently announced the discovery of HLX-1, the first representative of a new type of black hole….
Some 460 light-years away in the constellation Centaurus, a thick disk of dust swirled around a young star named TYC 8241 2652 1, where rocky planets like our own were arising. Then, in less than 2 years, the disk just vanished. That’s the unprecedented observation astronomers report in a new study, out today. Even more…
A giant string of invisible dark matter has been discovered across the universe between a pair of galaxy clusters. The filament forms a bridge between two huge clusters called Abell 222 and Abell 223, which lie 2.7 billion light-years away. The universe is thought to be filled with such strings of dark matter, a mysterious…
A spectacular new picture from the Hubble Space Telescope has captured a cosmic fireworks display in deep space: a geyser of gas fired off from a baby star. The celestial display is the result of Herbig-Haro 110, a gas jet erupting from a distant star and bouncing off of a nearby dust cloud. NASA scientists…
Frank Sinatra would have been happy to learn that a U.K. company called Excalibur Almaz wants to literally fly folks to the Moon and back again. The catch—it’ll cost a cool $150 million per ticket for a trip around Earth’s satellite and you’ll be flying in refurbished Soviet-era spacecraft built back in the 1970s. The…
A few strands of DNA could help solve the mystery of dark matter. A newly proposed detector aims to use DNA to resolve the conflicting claims from current dark matter detectors. Dark matter is thought to make up about 85% of the matter in the universe. The prime suspects are so-called weakly interacting massive particles,…