BALTIMORE — When the James Webb Space Telescope was first dreamed up, exoplanets hadn’t even been discovered yet. Now the observatory is showing astronomers what it can learn about planets…
Category: Space
The first planet found by the Kepler space telescope is doomed
The first planet ever spotted by the Kepler space telescope is falling into its star. Kepler launched in 2009 on a mission to find exoplanets by watching them cross in…
The last vital ingredient for life has been discovered on Enceladus
CHICAGO — The last key ingredient for life has been discovered on Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus. Phosphorus is a vital building block of life, used to construct DNA and RNA.…
How the James Webb telescope’s glances back in time are reshaping cosmology
BALTIMORE — The James Webb Space Telescope is living up to its promise as a wayback machine. The spectacularly sensitive observatory is finding and confirming galaxies more distant, and therefore…
NASA’s Perseverance rover captured the sound of a dust devil on Mars
Thanks to a bit of good luck, the Mars rover Perseverance has captured the first-ever sound of a Martian dust devil. The NASA rover has witnessed dusty whirlwinds before. But…
The tiny satellite aiming to reveal what dark matter is made of
Milky Way over sand dunes in Cervantes, Australia. Credit: Nik Coli/Shutterstock The European Space Agency (ESA) recently announced a new mission of its science program: a small telescope orbiting the…
A bizarre gamma-ray burst breaks the rules for these cosmic eruptions
Astronomers have spotted a bright gamma-ray burst that upends previous theories of how these energetic cosmic eruptions occur. For decades, astronomers thought that GRBs came in two flavors, long and…
In 2022, the James Webb Space Telescope brought us new views of the cosmos
This year marked the end of a decades-long wait for astronomers. The James Webb Space Telescope is finally in action. The telescope, which launched in December 2021, released its first…
A new supercomputer simulation animates the evolution of the universe
The infant universe transforms from a featureless landscape to an intricate web in a new supercomputer simulation of the cosmos’s formative years. An animation from the simulation shows our universe…
Here’s why some supermassive black holes blaze so brightly
For the first time, astronomers have observed how certain supermassive black holes launch jets of high-energy particles into space — and the process is shocking. Shock waves propagating along the…
