We’ve never seen images of space as astounding as those from the James Webb Space Telescope, which shared its first cosmic vistas in July. The pictures have left us dazzled,…
Category: Space
Astrophysicists chronicle the history of mathematical cosmology
Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain RUDN University astrophysicists have gathered the most important discoveries of modern cosmology from 1917 to our time. The collected data became an introduction to Philosophical Transactions…
The pristine Winchcombe meteorite suggests that Earth’s water came from asteroids
Late in the evening of February 28, 2021, a coal-dark space rock about the size of a soccer ball fell through the sky over northern England. The rock blazed in…
Part of a lost, ancient star catalog has now been found
Fragments of a star catalog from the second century B.C. have turned up in a manuscript that had been erased and written over centuries later. A new analysis of the…
Astronomers have found the closest known black hole to Earth
The closest black hole yet found is just 1,560 light-years from Earth, a new study reports. The black hole, dubbed Gaia BH1, is about 10 times the mass of the…
Marsquakes hint that the planet might be volcanically active after all
Mars might be, geologically speaking, not quite dead. Researchers have analyzed a slew of recent temblors on the Red Planet and shown that these Marsquakes are probably caused by magma…
Ancient bacteria could persist beneath Mars’ surface
Radiation-tolerant microbes might be able to live beneath Mars’ surface for hundreds of millions of years and may yet persist today, thanks in part — counterintuitively — to the Red…
Meet the BOAT, the brightest gamma-ray burst of all time
The brightest gamma-ray burst ever recorded recently lit up a distant galaxy — and astronomers have nicknamed it the BOAT, for Brightest of All Time. “We use the boat emoji…
Particles from space provide a new look inside cyclones
Particles raining down from space offer 3-D views inside swirling tropical storms. Muons created from cosmic rays that smash into Earth’s upper atmosphere have revealed the inner workings of cyclones…
