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Blue Origin rocket explodes on the launch pad during an engine-firing test

A rocket belonging to Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin exploded during a test at the launch pad Thursday night, shaking nearby homes and briefly painting the sky orange.

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Red dwarf stars detected ‘eating’ Earth-like planets

Astronomers have found some of the strongest evidence yet that stars can swallow their own planets. A new study, published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, supports the long-held belief that young stars are capable of “eating” nearby worlds as planetary systems form.

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Mineral clues in Gale Crater track ancient Mars climate change

While NASA imagery has shown evidence of ancient rivers and lakes on Mars that transitioned to dry dunes, uncertainty remains over the timing of the environmental changes that may have contributed to these shifts.

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Shock waves show how baby stars’ cradles get their radial shape in 3D simulations

The universe is full of fascinating structures, and some of the most striking take shape inside the giant clouds where stars are born. There, streams of gas appear to converge from all directions toward a dense central hub, like spokes meeting at the center of a wheel.

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Something just passed between us and a distant star

On the night of 18 December 2019, a star in our satellite galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud, briefly got brighter. Not dramatically nor explosively, just a smooth symmetrical rise and fall in brightness lasting about an hour, as though something had passed in front of it and bent its light toward us. Then it returned […]

Peering into the Milky Way’s far side, Roman could unveil 100,000 worlds

NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is poised to make a major leap in the hunt for worlds outside our solar system, known as exoplanets. Scientists expect the mission to reveal around 100,000 worlds—a staggering leap compared to the nearly 6,300 found so far thanks to NASA missions working in tandem with other observatories. And […]

Why the most massive galaxies in the early universe stopped forming stars prematurely

Astronomical observations show that the most massive galaxies in the early universe formed approximately three to four billion years after the Big Bang and stopped producing stars very early in cosmic history, around one billion years after their formation. This strange behavior has puzzled experts in the field. For comparison, our galaxy, the Milky Way, […]

The solar wind’s secret hammerheads and what they tell us about heat in space

The proton sharks showed up on a Friday. In a routine data calibration meeting for NASA’s Parker Solar Probe in 2020, a small group of scientists were scrolling through visualizations of their data showing solar winds. Suddenly, a weird shape flashed on the screen: Instead of the usual rounded blob of solar-wind protons, this distribution […]

Taking dark energy out of the equation: Mathematicians challenge the standard cosmological model of the universe

Mathematicians are challenging the idea that dark energy is responsible for the accelerating expansion of the universe. In a new paper published in Proceedings of the Royal Society A, mathematicians from the University of California, Davis, provide mathematical proof that instabilities inherent in the Einstein-Euler equations imply that the current model of the expanding universe […]

Bare supercontinent may have tipped ancient Earth into ‘Snowball’ phase

About a billion years ago, Earth started to come into its own. It was past the awkwardness of its younger years full of growing pains and turmoil: comet strikes and slimy water, including the Great Oxidation Event that flipped the world upside down. Roughly a billion years ago, the planet began to advance and mature, […]

Chang’e-5 regolith studies reveal nanoscale space-weathering processes

On the moon, the lack of atmosphere and accompanying features such as biological activity, oxygen-rich air, flowing water and rain, wind, and most erosion allows the lunar regolith to preserve a long-term record of surface processes in the space environment.

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A rare blue micromoon rises this weekend

Get set for a rare blue micromoon this weekend—a blue moon that’s also the most distant and smallest-looking full moon of the year.

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SpaceX’s Starship rockets are grounded pending investigation after test flight

SpaceX Starship launches are on hold pending an investigation into last week’s test flight.

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Astronomers discover how to estimate masses of newborn planets using dust rings

A team of astronomers, led by University of Warwick in collaboration with researchers at MIT and McMaster, have developed a novel method to use the properties of dust rings around stars to estimate the masses of newborn planets. Published in The Astrophysical Journal, this research offers astronomers a new way to find and characterize planets […]

The definitive census of multiple star systems within ten parsecs

Our sun is a loner. It lacks a stellar companion hurtling through interstellar space with it. But we’ve known for a long time that that’s actually relatively rare—most stars have at least one gravitationally bound partner. Understanding how exactly those stars are related to each other is critical for observational campaigns—especially for those of exoplanets. […]