Voyager will soon become the first man-made object to leave the solar system, scientists from NASA say. Voyager 1, which was launched in 1977, is expected to exit the solar system much sooner than previously thought. Voyager 1 and 2 are currently in what is known as the “Heliosheath” – the outermost layer of heliosphere…
A duo of planets some 1,200 light years from earth have been spotted passing within 1.2 million miles of each other, closer than any other known pair of planets, a new study has found.
The early universe was a vastly different place from the one we see today. No stars burned in faraway galaxies — there weren’t any galaxies. Instead, photons were trapped in a dance with the hot plasma of protons and electrons that suffused the universe. Sound waves rang out across this primordial soup, sloshing gas and…
Up to 22 percent of the surfaces of Shackleton Crater, located near the moon’s south pole, may be water ice, new findings from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter show. That may sound like a lot, but it adds up to only about 100 gallons of water inside the 12-mile wide, two-mile deep crater. “It’s not a…
The first-ever mission dedicated to looking for dark matter and dark energy, two mysterious entities believed to explain the composition of the universe as we know it, will be launched in 2020, the European Space Agency said. The 800-million-euro ($1-billion) Euclid project will use a satellite employing a 1.2-metre (four-foot) diameter telescope and special cameras…
Neutrons may be traveling from our universe into parallel worlds and back again, according to a new theory that explains a rather odd phenomenon. Experiments at ultra-low temperatures carried out by Anatoly Serebrov at the Institut Laue-Langevin in France have revealed a phenomenon known as neutron loss, whereby neutrons appear to vanish for short periods….
NASA’s hunting season has just begun, as the U.S. space agency launched its Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) spacecraft into orbit on a quest for black holes. Less than an hour after being flung out of the Earth’s atmosphere, the advanced telescope was reportedly safely on its intended course and already prepping for its two-year…
Small, rocky planets can coalesce around a wide variety of stars, suggesting that Earth-like alien worlds may have formed early and often throughout our Milky Way galaxy’s history, a new study reveals. Astronomers had previously noticed that huge, Jupiter-like exoplanets tend to be found around stars with high concentrations of so-called “metals” — elements heavier…
Physicists investigating the make-up of the universe are closing in on the Higgs boson, an elusive particle thought to have been key to turning debris from the Big Bang into stars, planets and finally life, scientists said. Researchers at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) are using their large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s…
The Spitzer Space Telescope has looked back in time to see what scientists called the “faint, lumpy glow” given off by the very first objects in the Universe, and these ancient objects obviously provided some early cosmic fireworks. While they are too faint and distant to figure out what the individual objects are – they…