The lander was listening. On February 18, NASA’s InSight lander on Mars turned its attention to the landing site for another mission, Perseverance, hoping to detect its arrival on the…
Category: Space
An X-ray glow suggests black holes or neutron stars fuel weird cosmic ‘cows’
A brilliant blast from a galaxy 2 billion light-years away is the brightest cosmic “Cow” found yet. It’s the fifth known object in this new class of exploding stars and…
An early outburst portends a star’s imminent death
A star’s death usually comes without warning. But an early sign of one star’s imminent demise hints at what happens before some stellar explosions. In a last hurrah before exploding,…
Astronomers identified a second possible exomoon
Some of the same researchers who found the first purported exomoon now say that they’ve found another. Dubbed Kepler 1708 b i, the satellite has a radius about 2.6 times…
Two stars’ close encounter may explain a cosmic flare that has barely faded
A newborn star whizzing past another stellar youngster triggered a cosmic flare-up that began nearly a century ago and is still going strong today, researchers say. In late 1936, a…
Spacecraft in 2021 set their sights on Mars, asteroids and beyond
While a flurry of missions crowded around Mars this year, some lesser-explored parts of the solar system are about to get fresh eyes. Three countries visited the Red Planet in…
Red giant stars that eat planets might shine less brightly
When giant stars eat giant planets, their starlight may shine a bit less brightly. That dimming could affect how astronomers measure distances across the universe — and possibly even put…
How slime mold helped scientists map out the cosmic web
Creeping tendrils of slime seem to mirror the structure of the universe’s enormous filaments. That superficial similarity, in an organism called a slime mold, helped scientists map out the cosmic…
Physics Nobel awarded for discoveries about the universe’s evolution and exoplanets
Two sets of cosmic discoveries have garnered the 2019 Nobel Prize in physics. Half of the prize of 9 million Swedish kronor (about $900,000) goes to James Peebles of Princeton…
A new book explores how the concept of the multiverse has evolved
The Number of the HeavensTom SiegfriedHarvard Univ., $29.95 There is no bigger question than whether the universe is all there is. Scientists are juggling several ideas for what a multiverse,…
