Even at this early stage in our spacefaring age, humanity has already begun sending probes that will eventually reach other solar systems, even if that was not their original intention. Five robotic explorers—Pioneer 10 and 11, Voyager 1 and 2, and New Horizons—are all on escape trajectories out of the solar system and might someday […]

Researchers using two of humanity’s most powerful observatories—NASA’s James Webb and Hubble Space Telescopes—have definitively shown that Terzan 5 is not a globular star cluster, as it was once classified, offering new insight into how galaxies like our own form and evolve over time.

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Have you ever been out at night and seen a streak of light blast across the sky and disappear? Ever wonder where that shooting star came from, or how it got to be in your sky?

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We think of atomic clocks as the definitive timekeepers. They are famous for being accurate down to the picosecond. Unfortunately, they are still subject to general relativity, so if you put them on a different planet, they will track time slightly faster or slower than on Earth, depending on the planet’s gravity. In Mars’ case, […]

Scientists await a big splash in the Pacific Ocean as one of the most research-packed Dragon spacecraft to date returns, completing the 34th SpaceX commercial resupply mission to the International Space Station for NASA. Biological and materials samples, along with tested hardware, are heading back to research teams on Earth for further analysis, advancing NASA’s […]

An international team of astronomers led by Camille Poitras, a Ph.D. student in the Faculty of Science and Engineering at Laval University, has produced the most detailed X-ray view ever obtained of the jet launched by the supermassive black hole in the galaxy M87. By combining observations from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory acquired between 2012 […]

Could Earth have seeded Jupiter’s moon Europa with bacterial life, where it could have taken hold in Europa’s ocean and perhaps evolved into something more? That’s the hypothesis of a new paper in the International Journal of Astrobiology by Zaza Osmanov of the Free University of Tbilisi in Georgia.

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Italian astronomers have used the Very Large Telescope (VLT) to perform polarimetric observations of the star WRAY 15-1880 and its young circumstellar disk. Results of the new observations, presented June 10 on the arXiv preprint server, suggest that this disk may host a primitive planetary system.

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