Rocket launches are among the most violent ways humans have devised to travel. They generate millions of pounds of thrust and subject passengers to intense g-forces. Humans must undergo serious training to withstand those forces, while machines must be designed to survive them. If a delicate mirror or solder joint cracks before a multibillion-dollar satellite […]

The cosmic microwave background (CMB) is the universe’s oldest light, leftover thermal radiation from about 380,000 years after the big bang. Maps of the CMB offer a picture of the “baby universe” as it was 13.8 billion years ago.

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In recent decades, astronomers have reconstructed a fairly complete scenario for planet formation, from minute dust motes clumping together to the emergence of rocky spheres thousands of kilometers across, like Earth, or larger gas giants like Jupiter.

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When the universe was still in its infancy—only 500 million years after the Big Bang, or about 3% of its current age—some of the universe’s earliest stars and galaxies had already formed. Astronomers have long predicted that much of the gas surrounding these young galaxies must have remained relatively pristine, composed mostly of hydrogen and […]

The asteroid Bennu orbits the sun once every 1.2 years and approaches Earth every six years, passing within around 300,000 kilometers. NASA took advantage of this to collect material from the celestial body. In a spectacular operation in 2023, the US space agency collected samples from the surface of the asteroid Bennu by its OSIRIS-REx […]

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope completed its 200,000th orbit around Earth on Sept. 19, marking another milestone for an observatory that continues to transform our understanding of the universe.

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Intense exercise during long spaceflights helps maintain heart structure and function within a range needed to tolerate the low-gravity environment of Mars, a study co-led by a UT Southwestern Medical Center researcher suggests. The findings, published in Circulation, not only address an issue critical to future space missions but could also lead to better interventions […]

If you want to understand the origins of black holes, Yale astronomers say, you need to look beyond the centers of galaxies and start searching in the nooks and crannies. That’s where you’ll find the “wanderers”—black holes whose journeys may tell the story of how the first black holes formed.

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