Solar wind is a never-ending stream of charged particles coming from the sun. Rather than a constant breeze, this wind is rather gusty. As solar wind particles travel through space, they interact with the sun’s variable magnetic field, creating chaotic and fluctuating motion known as turbulence.

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On Sept. 9 and 10, scientists and engineers tested NASA’s LEMS (Lunar Environment Monitoring Station) instrument suite in a “sandbox” of simulated moon regolith at the Florida Space Institute’s Exolith Lab at the University of Central Florida in Orlando.

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Given how unfathomably large the universe is, it is perhaps understandable that we haven’t yet cracked all its secrets. But there are actually some pretty basic features, ones we used to think we could explain, that cosmologists are increasingly struggling to make sense of.

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In 1998, scientists discovered that our universe expands with acceleration, and in order to explain this effect, the concept of dark matter was introduced. This is a special type of energy that fills up all of existing space-time but is impossible to detect by direct methods.

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A team of astrophysicists from several institutions in Italy, working with a colleague in the U.S., has found that aliphatic hydrocarbons observed on Ceres’ surface have short lifetimes, suggesting they likely appeared there within the last 10 million years.

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Astronomers have published a gigantic infrared map of the Milky Way containing more than 1.5 billion objects―the most detailed one ever made. Using the European Southern Observatory’s VISTA telescope, the team monitored the central regions of our galaxy over more than 13 years. At 500 terabytes of data, this is the largest observational project ever […]