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NASA’s Webb catches exoplanet getting roasted

One well-done gas giant, coming right up! That’s the latest from researchers analyzing NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope observations of HD 80606 b, an exoplanet four times the mass of Jupiter with an extremely elliptical orbit that sweeps close by its sun-like star. The research team is presenting its study and preliminary findings Tuesday at […]

Oddball exoplanet challenges what it means to be a hot Jupiter

New research led by a scientist at IPAC—a science and data center for astrophysics and planetary science at Caltech—studying the hot Jupiter CoRoT-2 b has settled on one of the three leading hypotheses explaining why its atmosphere has a hot spot in the opposite direction from that seen on all other exoplanets of this type. […]

After three sessions, SpaceX already among world’s most valuable companies

SpaceX shares surged again Tuesday, lifting Elon Musk’s rocket company into the world’s top five in market value for most of the session as a record-breaking IPO gave way to a torrid buying frenzy.

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Tracing a neutrino ghost to a distant ‘shadow blaster’ galaxy

Neutrinos are one of the fundamental particles of the universe. They live a ghostly existence with no electric charge, very little mass and extremely few interactions with matter. They are also the most abundant particles with mass in the universe and can be created through a variety of processes, such as the decay of heavy […]

Are alien probes hiding in our backyard? A new study says we’ve barely looked

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 […]

Q&A: Boosting NASA’s Swift Observatory to support continued space observation

NASA’s “rapid-response” space telescope is slowly falling out of orbit, but a daring mission this summer could allow the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory to continue scanning the sky for many more years to come. In the first mission of its kind, a spacecraft will launch from Earth and rendezvous with Swift to boost it to […]

Webb and Hubble reveal the history of a relic of Milky Way’s formation

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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Quantum lab aboard space station gets ‘chilly’ upgrade

Astronauts aboard the International Space Station have switched on NASA’s newly upgraded Cold Atom Lab, a one-of-a-kind facility designed to improve how scientists explore the fundamental workings of matter and develop new quantum technologies. By leveraging the unique environment of microgravity in space, the lab can accomplish cutting-edge science impossible to do anywhere else.

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Asteroid or comet? Meteor or meteorite? How to identify and classify the rocks you see streaking through the sky

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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Third time’s the charm for a row of faint galaxies without dark matter

A Yale-led team of astronomers has found a third galaxy devoid of dark matter—located alongside the other two in a formation that has never been seen before. Astronomers have followed a faint, cosmic trail of gas to a third galaxy that has no dark matter.

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Future Martian colonists will need a new relativistic clock

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, […]

Deep magma oceans may have locked ferric iron into majorite on Earth and Mars

In rocky planets such as Earth and Mars, the oxidation state of the mantle is thought to strongly influence the melting temperature of mantle materials (i.e., magma generation), the composition of volcanic gases, and ultimately the evolution of surface environments. In particular, during the solidification of the “magma ocean,” which is believed to have been […]

NASA’s SpaceX CRS-34 Dragon returns packed with space station science

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 […]

Black holes unleash delayed radio ‘burps’ years after tearing apart stars

Astronomers using the U.S. National Science Foundation Very Large Array (NSF VLA) have found that when a supermassive black hole tears apart an unlucky star, the fireworks are not over when the first flash fades. Years after the initial outburst, many of these black holes “burp” out streams of material that slam into surrounding gas […]

Chandra tracks M87 black hole’s evolving jet in finest X-ray detail yet

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 […]