astronomy

Two private companies are partnering up to establish a repeatable debris removal service for low Earth orbit, and they want to debut it in 2027.

Four powerful lasers from Chile are helping astronomers see the universe with unmatched clarity.

Phobos is speeding toward its inevitable destruction, but scientists have uncovered a surprising twist in its timeline. Could it break apart even sooner than expected?

NASA awards Interlune a $6.9 million contract to test helium-3 extraction on the Moon, marking a turning point in lunar resource exploration.

In 1961, amidst the tensions of the Space Race, NASA made an unpopular choice: Concerned with booster issues during a January test flight with a chimpanzee, the agency chose to run additional tests without human astronauts. Project Mercury, the American push for space success in the face of strong competition from the Soviets, had been Continue reading "May 5, 1961: The first American in space" T…

NASA releases 12,000 new Artemis II images, revealing humanity’s most distant journey in unprecedented detail.

Gravitational anomalies exist near black hole mergers, but they are generally understood as extreme manifestations of gravity predicted by General Relativity (GR), rather than violations of physics. These mergers are the most energetic events in the universe, generating massive ripples in spacetime called gravitational waves. Explore whether gravitational anomalies occur during black hole mergers…

Blue Origin’s Blue Moon MK1 lunar lander has cleared a major milestone after completing environmental testing inside NASA’s Thermal Vacuum Chamber A in Houston.

Far beyond Neptune, in one of the coldest and darkest regions of our solar system, astronomers have discovered something unexpected: a small icy object with an atmosphere that shouldn’t really be there. This object, known as 2002 XV93, belongs to a group of distant bodies called trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs). These objects orbit the Sun at […] The post How can this tiny world have an atmosphere?…

Mars has lots of glaciers located along its mid-latitudes. We’ve known this for years thanks to the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s (MRO’s) SHARAD sounder. But, despite all of the excellent data it’s managed to gather, SHARAD doesn’t have high enough resolution to accurately measure the boundary between the glacier itself and the rocky material that has been deposited on top of it over the course o…

On January 10, 2024, a dim star in the constellation Gemini began to disappear. Not dramatically, not all at once, but gradually, its light thinning by degrees as something cold and dark slid in front of it. From three stations across Japan, astronomers watched the light curves on their monitors and saw what they hadn’t expected to see: a gradual fade where physics said there should be an abrupt …

After Artemis 2, NASA's moon return hinges on two unproven commercial landers, each of which faces major technical and timeline challenges.

One of the best-performing models in cosmology is also one with the least physical rationale behind it. Columnist Leah Crane says this leaves us with a puzzle that could make or break physics as we know it

Executive MBA student Ryan Crider and 2020 MBV alumnus Vladillen Gonzalez played critical roles in the historic space mission. The post Trojans provide support for NASA Artemis II mission appeared first on USC .

As the Northern Hemisphere progresses through the balmy days of Spring, it's a perfect time...

A long-standing cosmic mystery is beginning to yield new clues as researchers uncover a strikingly consistent pattern in the behavior of high-energy particles traveling across the universe. More than 100 years after their discovery, cosmic rays continue to puzzle scientists. These extremely energetic particles travel across the universe from distant and powerful sources. The DAMPE [...]

Astronomers have finally identified where the Milky Way’s star-making activity fades, uncovering a long-sought boundary in our galaxy. Determining how far the Milky Way extends has always been tricky because its disk does not end abruptly — it gradually fades into space. Now, researchers have identified a clear boundary for where new stars are actively [...]

Curiosity just found molecules on Mars tied to the chemistry of life, hinting at a more habitable past. NASA’s Curiosity rover has discovered a wide variety of organic molecules on Mars, including compounds often viewed as essential ingredients for the origin of life on Earth. These results come from a chemical experiment carried out on [...]

Based on the underlying logic of the matter-energy cycle in the universe, this study constructs a true infinite void field matter-energy evolution model, systematically explaining the complete cycle from void field creation, cosmic evolution, to ultimate fate. The model takes the true infinite void field as the theoretical foundation, defines chaotic energy as the primordial material of all cosmi…