A commercial airliner flies Northwest across Lake Michigan in front of the “Full Buck” supermoon, the first of four supermoons in 2023, July 3, 2023, in Chicago. The cosmos is…
Category: Space
Why Does Matter Exist? Roundness of Electrons May Hold Clues
JILA physicists make record-breaking measurement of a key electron property, related to the possible existence of all matter. In the first moments of our universe, countless numbers of protons, neutrons…
In Search of Other Worlds: How Exoplanets Form and Evolve
Assistant Professor Marta Bryan is studying the properties of exoplanets to better understand how our planet and species fit into the larger universe. It wasn’t that long ago that astronomers…
Astronomers shed new light on formation of mysterious fast radio bursts
The Chinese Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST). Credit: Bojun Wang, Jinchen Jiang & Qisheng Cui More than 15 years after the discovery of fast radio bursts (FRBs)—millisecond-long, deep-space cosmic…
Need to image an asteroid close up? There’s an AMIGO for that
Artist’s depiction of a fully inflated AMIGO. Credit: Schwatz et al. There are so many asteroids. Just in our own backyard, we’ve found over 30,000 Near Earth asteroids. Exploring them…
A gamma ray burst lasted so long it triggered a satellite twice
An artist’s depiction of a gamma-ray burst’s relativistic jet full of very-high-energy photons breaking out of a collapsing star. Credit: DESY, Science Communication Lab Gamma ray bursts (GRBs) are the…
Webb Detects Water Vapor in Rocky Planet-Forming Zone
Water is essential for life as we know it. However, scientists debate how it reached the Earth and whether the same processes could seed rocky exoplanets orbiting distant stars. New…
Novel Algorithm Improves Understanding of Plasma Shock Waves in Space
Frontera and Stampede2 supercomputers help scientists resolve and analyze challenging plasma shock wave structures. Imagine the explosive disturbance caused by a jet going supersonic. A similar shock wave occurs when…
Orbiting astronaut oversees robot team on Earth
The Rollin’ Justin robot in DLR’s planetary surface test environment at the Agency’s German Space Operations Center in Operpfaffenhofen near Munich, used for the Surface Avatar test on 24 July…
Stellar Demolition Derby Generates a Powerful Gamma-Ray Burst
While searching for the origins of a powerful stellar gamma-ray burst (GRB), an international team of astrophysicists may have stumbled upon a new way stars might be destroyed. Astronomers studying…
