Last November, when NASA’s Lucy spacecraft flew past its first official asteroid target named Dinkinesh, it found the space rock was not one, not two but three rocks huddled together.…
Category: Astronomy
A flight out of this world
Rovers have roamed its alien terrain, scooping up rock samples and searching for signs of microbial life in basins once awash with water. An illustration of the Mars Aerial Ground…
‘Mother of Dragons’ Comet Visible in the Night Sky
Comets are ancient cosmic icebergs. They are roughly 4.6 billion years old and formed at the same time as the Sun, Earth and the other planets. Gravitational interactions fling them towards…
Fast Radio Bursts – Technology Org
No one knows what causes them, but they may help us map the universe down to its furthest reaches fast radio bursts. Bright flashes travelling across galaxies, their origins shrouded…
Signs of life detectable in single ice grain emitted from extraterrestrial moons
The ice-encrusted oceans of some of the moons orbiting Saturn and Jupiter are leading candidates in the search for extraterrestrial life. A new lab-based study led by the University of…
Citizen Scientist Group Finds 15 Rare ‘Active Asteroids’
Not all asteroids are alike. Some of them, known as “active” asteroids, sport comet-like tails of gas and dust. Studying active asteroids could reveal clues to how the solar system…
Explaining a Supernova’s ‘String of Pearls’
Physicists often use the Rayleigh-Taylor instability to explain why fluid structures form in plasmas, but research from the University of Michigan suggests that that may not be the full story…
Astronomers Spot Oldest ‘Dead’ Galaxy Yet Observed
Using the James Webb Space Telescope, an international team of astronomers led by the University of Cambridge have spotted a ‘dead’ galaxy when the universe was just 700 million years…
NASA’s Roman Team Selects Survey to Map Our Galaxy’s Far Side
The plane of our Milky Way galaxy is seen in ESA’s Gaia space mission. It contains more than a billion stars and darker, dusty regions Gaia couldn’t see through. With…
NASA’s Webb Finds Ethanol, Other Icy Ingredients for Worlds
The science team also detected simpler molecules, including formic acid (which causes the burning sensation of an ant sting), methane, formaldehyde, and sulfur dioxide. Research suggests that sulfur-containing compounds like…
