A new way to characterize habitable planets

Dramatic plumes spray water ice and vapor from many locations along the famed “tiger stripes” near the south pole of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. The tiger stripes are four prominent, approximately…

JWST sets a new record, sees newly forming stars in the Triangulum galaxy

Galaxy M33 (Triangulum Galaxy) as seen by Hubble Space Telescope. JWST was used recently to observe sites in its southern arm where newly forming stars (YSOs) appear to lie. Our…

Curiosity captures a martian day, from dawn to dusk

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain When NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover isn’t on the move, it works pretty well as a sundial, as seen in two black-and-white videos recorded on Nov. 8,…

Indian astronomers explore open cluster NGC 6940 with AstroSat

The spatial distribution, proper motion, and parallax distributions of the members of NGC 6940 and sample sources determined using the ML-MOC algorithm. Credit: Panthi and Vaidya, 2023 Using the AstroSat…

Using smart materials to deploy a Dark Age explorer

Depiction of the different signals and the telescopes that would detect them. Credit: Palmar et al One of the most significant constraints on the size of objects placed into orbit…

Lost in space? Just use relativity

Depiction of the three telescope system described in the paper. Credit: Paul McKee, Hoang Nguyen, Michael W. Kudenov, John A. Christian One of the hardest things for many people to…

Japan moon lander enters lunar orbit

Side view of the crater Moltke taken from Apollo 10. Credit: Public Domain Japan’s SLIM space probe entered the moon’s orbit on Monday in a major step towards the country’s…

NASA asteroid sampling mission renamed OSIRIS-APEX for new journey

These images of asteroid Apophis were recorded in March 2021 by radio antennas at the Deep Space Network’s Goldstone complex in California and the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia.…

Why the universe might be a hologram

The colored circle represents the hologram, out of which the knotted optical vortex emerges. Credit: University of Bristol A quarter century ago, physicist Juan Maldacena proposed the AdS/CFT correspondence, an…

Ancient stars could make elements with more than 260 protons

R-process nucleosynthesis. Credit: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory The first stars of the universe were monstrous beasts. Comprised only of hydrogen and helium, they could be 300 times more massive than…