It’s time to get serious about science in space, and the International Space Station is the perfect place to start, NASA officials said. “We are in a position in space research and space exploration where we have to push the ball and advance forward or we’re about ready to retreat from space,” William Gerstenmaier, NASA’s…
Within a sliver of a second after it was born, our universe expanded staggeringly in size, by a factor of at least 10^26. That’s what most cosmologists maintain, although it remains a mystery as to what might have begun and ended this wild expansion. Now scientists are increasingly wondering if the most powerful particle collider…
Data from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft have revealed Saturn’s moon Titan likely harbors a layer of liquid water under its ice shell. Researchers saw a large amount of squeezing and stretching as the moon orbited Saturn. They deduced that if Titan were composed entirely of stiff rock, the gravitational attraction of Saturn would cause bulges, or…
Eighth-century jump in carbon-14 levels in trees could be explained by “red crucifix” supernova.
Scientists at the Brookhaven National Laboratory have carried out an experiment that has recreated a form of matter that pervaded the entire universe a fraction of a second after the Big Bang – the cosmic explosion that marked the origin of the universe. The experiment produced fundamental insights into laws pertaining to all visible matter….
The Wow! signal, a mysterious radio transmission detected in 1977 that may or may not have come from extraterrestrials, is finally getting a response from humanity. Anyone can contribute his or her two cents — or 140 characters, to be exact — to the cosmic reply via Twitter. All tweets composed between 8 p.m. EDT…
Our universe could have popped into existence 13.7 billion years ago without any divine help whatsoever, researchers say. That may run counter to our instincts, which recoil at the thought of something coming from nothing, but scientists say, we should trust the laws of physics. In the very weird world of quantum mechanics, which describes…
Researchers have come up with a way to glimpse the infant Universe by decoding the earliest ripples in its light. They say this can be achieved by capturing the specific radio wavelength of 21cm from the heavens. The trick is to tell the difference between 21cm waves from our galaxy and those from distant, ancient…
Snowflakes on Mars are smaller than their Earth counterparts, having roughly the same diameter as a human red blood cell, a new study reports. Researchers analyzed observations made by two Mars-orbiting spacecraft to calculate the size of snowflakes on the Red Planet, which are composed of carbon dioxide rather than water. Snowflakes require a kernel…
The amount of water in places of the Martian mantle is vastly larger than previous estimates and is similar to that of Earth’s, scientists have found. The finding is based on the analysis of the water content of two Martian meteorites originating from inside the Red Planet. The results not only affect what we know…