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Apollo’s impatient old-timers are rooting for NASA’s return to the moon with Artemis II launch

The people who toiled night and day to put astronauts on the moon during Apollo are thrilled that NASA is finally going back. They just wish these Artemis moonshots had happened sooner while more of Apollo’s workforce was still alive.

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Ripples in spacetime and the universe’s most controversial number

Douglas Adams told us the answer to life, the universe and everything is 42. If only cosmology were so straightforward. Astronomers have been arguing for years about a number every bit as fundamental, and they still can’t agree on it.

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Apollo vs. Artemis: What to know about NASA’s return to the moon

NASA’s Apollo moonshots are a tough act to follow, even after all this time.

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ZTF discovers a new mass-transferring brown dwarf binary system

Astronomers from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and elsewhere report the discovery of a binary system consisting of two brown dwarfs undergoing stable mass transfer. The detection of the system, designated ZTF J1239+8347, was made with the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) and is detailed in a paper published March 18 in The Astrophysical Journal […]

TESS discovers an Earth-sized planet orbiting nearby M-dwarf star

Using NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), an international team of astronomers has discovered an extrasolar planet orbiting TOI-4616—a nearby M-dwarf star. The newfound alien world, which received designation TOI-4616 b, is slightly larger than Earth. The finding was reported in a research paper published March 11 on the arXiv pre-print server.

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The time capsule in the salt flat

There is a place in northern Chile, 3,500 meters above sea level in the Andean Altiplano, where almost nothing survives. The Salar de Pajonales is a salt flat of savage extremes temperatures swinging from −23°C to 26°C, solar radiation among the highest measured anywhere on Earth, annual rainfall that barely registers, and winds that rip […]

The moon that tipped a planet

Neptune is the solar system’s most distant planet, a cold, blue ice giant sitting nearly 30 times further from the sun than Earth. At that remote distance, temperatures plunge to nearly minus 200 degrees Celsius and a single year lasts 165 Earth years. Yet despite its isolation, Neptune is a world whipped by the fastest […]

A million new SpaceX satellites will destroy the night sky—for everyone on Earth

More than 10,000 Starlink satellites currently orbit Earth. We see them crawling across dark skies, no matter how remote our location, and streaking through images from research telescopes.

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The JWST finds more overmassive black holes. This time in dwarf galaxies

One of the things astronomers find when they look around at galaxies is a correlation between a galaxy’s mass and the mass of its supermassive black hole. Contrary to popular belief, these SMBH don’t anchor their galaxies; they make up only a small portion of a galaxy’s mass. In local galaxies, the ratio of SMBH […]

Black hole mergers test the limits of general relativity

General relativity stands as one of the bedrock theories in modern physics. Its strange view of relative time and space has been confirmed by countless experimental and observational tests, from rotational frame dragging to the radiation of gravitational waves. But there is reason to believe that it is not the final say on the nature […]

Scientists detect magnetic waves deep within the sun, helping predict solar activity

Researchers at NYU Abu Dhabi have discovered new large-scale waves moving deep inside the sun, driven by magnetic fields far below the surface. These waves provide a window into parts of the sun that are otherwise inaccessible, giving scientists a new tool to study how its magnetic field is formed and evolves over time.

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Giant craters may reveal if Psyche is a lost planetary core

When we think of asteroids, we almost immediately think of giant rocks bouncing around like the iconic chase scene in “The Empire Strikes Back,” and we often hear how they are remnants from the birth of the solar system. While the asteroids that comprise the Main Asteroid Belt of our solar system are not only […]

Artemis II astronauts arrive at Florida launch site for first moon trip in 53 years

The astronauts set to become the first lunar visitors in more than half a century arrived at their launch site Friday, joining the towering rocket that stands poised to blast off next week and send them around the moon.

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He suddenly couldn’t speak in space. NASA astronaut says his medical scare remains a mystery

The astronaut who prompted NASA’s first medical evacuation earlier this year said Friday that doctors still don’t know why he suddenly fell sick at the International Space Station.

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JWST solves decades-long mystery about why Saturn appears to change its spin

Researchers at Northumbria University have used the most powerful space telescope ever built to answer one of the longest-standing puzzles in planetary science—why does Saturn appear to spin at a different speed depending on how you measure it? The findings, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics, reveal for the first time the […]