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…
Category: Space
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…
Was Olympus Mons once a giant volcanic island?
Olympus Mons: a volcanic island in the middle of a vanished Martian ocean. Credit: A.Hildenbrand/Geops/CNRS (produced from MOLA public data) Imagine a volcanic island about the size of France and…
Future Ultra-Precise Timing Links to Geosynchronous Satellites
Between mountains in Hawai‘i, innovative scientists show precision timing at the quantum limit. Last year, scientists drove up Mauna Loa volcano on Hawai‘i, aimed a laser at a reflector positioned…
