NEOShield is a new international project that will assess the threat posed by Near Earth Objects (NEO) and look at the best possible solutions for dealing with a big asteroid or comet on a collision path with our planet. The major EU-funded initiative will pull together all the latest science, initiate a fair few laboratory…
For the first time, scientists have caught a glimpse of a comet’s final minutes before it was vaporized by the sun. The comet was flying at about 1.4 million miles an hour.
Why does our universe look the way it does? In particular, why do we only experience three spatial dimensions in our universe, when superstring theory, for instance, claims that there are ten dimensions — nine spatial dimensions and a tenth dimension of time? Japanese scientists think they may have an explanation for how a three-dimensional universe emerged…
What existed before the big bang? What is the nature of time? Is our universe one of many? On the big questions science cannot (yet?) answer, a new crop of philosophers are trying to provide answers. Stephen Hawking may have famously declared that “Philosophy is dead.” but philosopher of physics Tim Maudlin disagrees. Maudlin, whose…
A team of astronomers has identified a new galaxy that may be made completely of dark matter, the second of its kind. In a discovery announced in January, an international team of researchers has found a dark dwarf galaxy about 10 billion light years from Earth. In the current issue of Nature, the team of…
Taking a picture of a black hole, an object so gravitationally bound that not even photons of light can escape, sounds like an oxymoron, but astronomers are attempting to do just that. What they’re hoping to glimpse is something called the “event horizon” — the swirl of matter and energy that are visible around the…
A hail of Martian meteorites crashed to Earth last July, and collectors and scientists around the world are snapping up the ultra-rare rocks for display and study. The meteorites fell in the Moroccan desert in July and were recovered a few months later. Scientists confirmed that the rocks are Martian, presumably blasted off the Red…
Members of the public are being asked to join the hunt for nearby planets that could support life.Volunteers can go to the Planethunters website to see time-lapsed images of 150,000 stars, taken by the Kepler space telescope. They will be advised on the signs that indicate the presence of a planet and how to alert…
It’s another batch of newly discovered earth-like planets, according to NASA officials. U.S. space agency officials announced they have discovered another series of planets, the latest such planets to hit the space agency radar. The space agency said the latest discover reveals some of the smallest earth-like planets yet discovered. Space agency officials said the…
As we go back in time, we find that heat intensifies to such a level that all bonds that keep matter together break: no more molecules, atoms, atomic nuclei; even protons and neutrons get broken down to their constituent quarks. If we keep going back, we quickly reach a time when energies were beyond what…