The South African Astronomical Observatory in Sutherland, in the country’s Northern Cape province. Credit: IAU General Assembly 2024 Cutting-edge telescopes, gravitational waves, black holes and our solar system’s central star,…
Category: Planetary Science
SpaceX knocks out company’s 50th Space Coast launch of the year
Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain SpaceX shot up three Falcon 9 rockets from three launch pads last weekend once the Federal Aviation Administration gave its grounded rocket the OK to return…
Scientists discuss why we might not spot solar panel technosignatures
Conceptual image of an exoplanet with an advanced extraterrestrial civilization. Structures on the right are orbiting solar panel arrays that harvest light from the parent star and convert it into…
Scientists pin down the origins of the moon’s tenuous atmosphere
Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain While the moon lacks any breathable air, it does host a barely-there atmosphere. Since the 1980s, astronomers have observed a very thin layer of atoms bouncing…
Massive solar wind disturbance caused Earth’s magnetosphere to fly without its usual tail
A coronal mass ejection in April 2023 caused Earth to grow Alfvén wings. (This CME, with Earth illustrated to scale, took place in 2021.) Credit: NASA/GSFC/SDO Like a supersonic jet…
Astronomers use AI to find elusive stars ‘gobbling up’ planets
Credit: NASA, ESSA, Joseph Olmsted (STScI). Astronomers have recently found hundreds of “polluted” white dwarf stars in our home galaxy, the Milky Way. These are white dwarfs caught actively consuming…
After debris concerns, SpaceX to shift Dragon capsule landings from Florida to California
Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain Evidence of debris stemming from return trips of SpaceX Dragon spacecraft has prompted the company to shift future landing operations from Florida to California. The move…
The sun’s corona is weirdly hot, and Parker Solar Probe rules out one explanation
As Parker Solar Probe files around the sun, it finds abrupt reversals in the direction of the sun’s magnetic fields. These S-shaped bends in the sun’s magnetic field are very…
Ever see a star explode? You’re about to get a chance very soon
Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain Every clear night for the last three weeks, Bob Stephens has pointed his home telescope at the same two stars in hopes of witnessing one of…
Study examines matter distribution and supports unknown influence or new particle
Artistic reconstruction of a photon’s path through intergalactic gas. Credit: UC Riverside The dense peaks in the wavelength distribution graph observed in a Lyman-Alpha forest indeed resemble many small trees.…
