Few things are harder than hurling a robot into space — and sticking the landing. On the morning of July 4, 1997, mission controllers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in…
Category: Space
The Windchime experiment could use gravity to hunt for dark matter ‘wind’
The secret to directly detecting dark matter might be blowin’ in the wind. The mysterious substance continues to elude scientists even though it outweighs visible matter in the universe by…
A new James Webb telescope image reveals a galactic collision’s aftermath
It’s not easy being ringed. A newly released image from the James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST, shows the Cartwheel Galaxy still reeling from a run-in with a smaller galaxy…
Two black holes merged despite being born far apart in space
Signals buried deep in data from gravitational wave observatories imply a collision of two black holes that were clearly born in different places. Almost all the spacetime ripples that experiments…
Astronauts might be able to use asteroid soil to grow crops
Astronauts might one day dine on salad grown in asteroid soil. Romaine lettuce, chili pepper and pink radish plants all grew in mixtures of peat moss and faux asteroid soil,…
Amateur astronomers’ images of a rare double aurora may unlock its secrets
What happens when two different kinds of auroras get together? One spills the other’s secrets. Amateur astronomers have captured a strange combination of red and green auroras on camera, and…
The heaviest neutron star on record is 2.35 times the mass of the sun
A fast-spinning neutron star south of the constellation Leo is the most massive of its kind seen so far, according to new observations. The record-setting collapsed star, named PSR J0952-0607,…
An AI-assisted analysis of three-dimensional galaxy distribution in our universe
Flow chart of how the emulator developed by the research team works. Credit: Kavli IPMU, NAOJ By applying a machine-learning technique, a neural network method, to gigantic amounts of simulation…
How James Webb Space Telescope data have already revealed surprises
Massimo Pascale wasn’t planning to study the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723. But as soon as he saw the cluster glittering in the first image from the James Webb Space Telescope,…
Clouds in the Milky Way’s plasma bubbles came from the starry disk — and far beyond
Huge bubbles of plasma billowing out from the Milky Way’s center might contain scraps from all over the galaxy — and beyond. A new look at gas clouds in the…
