Color-coded chromium abundance map overlain on MESSENGER image of Mercury. Credit: Larry Nittler/ASU The origin of Mercury, the closest planet to the sun, is mysterious in many ways. It has…
Category: Space
A new technique uses remote images to gauge the strength of ancient and active rivers beyond Earth
Images from the Cassini mission show river networks draining into lakes in Titan’s north polar region. Credit: NASA/JPL/USGS Rivers have flowed on two other worlds in the solar system besides…
Solar storm on Thursday expected to make Northern Lights visible in 17 states
An aurora borealis, also known as the northern lights, is seen in the night sky in the early morning hours of Monday, April 24, 2023, near Washtucna, Wash. A solar…
Origins of Merging Black Holes in Galaxies Like Our Own
Stellar-mass black holes are celestial objects born from the collapse of stars with masses of a few to low hundreds of times that of our sun. Their gravitational field is…
Pulsars: New Access to the Universe
Precise as a clock: pulsars in the Milky Way form large-scale observatory for gravitational waves. Astronomical observatories are usually based on Earth and study the extreme processes in the universe…
Antarctic Experiment Maps the Milky Way Galaxy’s High-Energy Neutrinos
IceCube, an Antarctic telescope, has directly observed neutrinos, hard-to-detect subatomic particles, coming from our own galaxy, the Milky Way. For as long as humans have existed, we’ve been able to…
Asteroid named after Portuguese astrophysicist
Image of asteroid 243 Ida, taken by the Galileo spacecraft. Despite being about ten times larger than asteroid 32599 Pedromachado, 243 Ida is also found in the Asteroid Belt. Credit:…
Webb detects most distant active supermassive black hole to date
The graphic shows the redshift of one active supermassive black hole. At top right is the complete NIRCam image of the field, which has an uneven white outline and is…
Light supergiant reveals a missing evolutionary stage
Artist’s impression of the discovered massive binary system consisting of a stripped star in the background and a Be star in the foreground. Although the stripped star appears bigger, it…
‘Chorus’ of Gravitational Waves Found
Gravitational waves, ripples in the fabric of time-space predicted by Albert Einstein more than a century ago, are permeating the universe at low frequencies, according to a multiyear National Science…
