NASA telescope honors Nancy Grace Roman, architect of space-based astronomy

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is set to launch this weekend aboard a SpaceX rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. When it becomes operational early next year, it will transform our view of the universe.

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Will new telescope Roman help reveal long-kept secrets of the universe? Q&A with an expert

On Sunday, Aug. 30, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is expected to launch from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The observatory will join the Hubble Space Telescope, launched in 1990, and the James Webb Space Telescope, launched in 2021, in scanning the vastness of space and potentially finding answers to longstanding mysteries of […]

Discovery reveals rapid pathways to complex aromatic molecules in space

A team of researchers led by the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa Department of Chemistry has uncovered a faster way large carbon-based molecules may form in space, helping solve a long-standing mystery about how some of the building blocks of the universe grow.

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ASTRID traces 13.5 billion years of black hole and galaxy evolution

In dark skies at night, distant starlight twinkles and speaks to vast cosmic histories almost as old as time itself. New data from instruments such as NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope are helping astrophysicists probe deep cosmic mysteries, including the evolution of black holes and galaxies.

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Milky Way’s own gravity can mimic dark matter clues, stellar stream simulations suggest

Most of the stars in our Milky Way galaxy sit neatly on a flat plane. But the space around our galaxy is much more chaotic. Rogue bands of stars called “stellar streams” orbit the Milky Way much like planets in our solar system orbit the sun.

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NASA Johnson pilots chase moon’s shadow for eclipse science

During the Aug. 12 total solar eclipse over Europe, scientists aimed to study a long-standing mystery: why the sun’s outer atmosphere, the corona, is far hotter than its visible surface. Capturing the data they needed meant being in exactly the right place at the right time.

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Mars rovers give scientists a ground‑level view of the red planet—peek inside their NASA control room

Lights blink on as I enter the Rover Operations Center at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, at 7:30 a.m. I’m the first to arrive, even though I already feel late.

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NASA’s Webb telescope rules out two new Dyson sphere candidates

The latest Swedish-led search for technosignatures in the form of Dyson spheres has again come up empty-handed. The two latest stellar candidates in the hunt for such hypothetical extraterrestrial technology have been eliminated as Dyson spheres.

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New clues about how space travel may affect women’s health

As space missions become longer and ambitions for deep-space travel grow, scientists are working to understand how life beyond Earth may affect every system in the human body. Two years after her initial study took flight, Begum Mathyk, MD, and collaborators are continuing to push the frontier of women’s health in space, this time by […]

Venus’s mysterious clouds may hide an exceptionally strong light absorber

Venus appears pale yellow in visible light, but ultraviolet images reveal dramatic dark and bright patterns moving with the planet’s upper sulfuric acid clouds. Scientists have known about these markings for roughly a century, yet the chemical identity of the material responsible—the “unknown absorber”—remains unresolved.

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The crisis in cosmology continues: Critical problems in a recent defense of cosmic acceleration

Doubts about the standard model of cosmology are deepening after a new study identified fundamental problems in a recent analysis that defended the conventional view that the universe is currently undergoing accelerated expansion driven by dark energy.

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Thermal anomaly discovered below Mars’ south pole

Researchers have discovered a thermal asymmetry deep beneath the surface across Mars’ southern hemisphere. Based on gravitational measurements that provide clues to the Red Planet’s interior structure, Mars’ southern interior is around 200 to 400 degrees Celsius warmer than the planet’s northern half and partially molten. The surprising finding adds context to Martian history and […]

Roman telescope aims to directly image exoplanets 1,000 times fainter than current limits

The Roman Space Telescope is designed to directly image exoplanets using complex optomechanical systems developed by the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy

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Liquid gallium experiment confirms key flow regime inside rapidly rotating stars and planets

Since we cannot look into the interiors of stars and planets, we rely on lab experiments to replicate the physical processes that occur there. Led by the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), an international research team has produced the first experimental verification of a theoretically predicted flow state deemed characteristic of the interiors of […]

Did ocean motion carve Enceladus’s tiger stripes?

Saturn’s moon Enceladus sports a thick shell of ice surrounding a liquid water ocean. As though scraped by an enormous claw, four parallel cracks slash across its south pole. Each about 500 meters (1,600 feet) deep, 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) across and 130 kilometers (81 miles) long, the fissures spew water vapor and other materials […]