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Hubble sees galaxy with dark rings in new light

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features an uncommon galaxy with a striking appearance. NGC 7722 is a lenticular galaxy located about 187 million light-years away in the constellation Pegasus.

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Perseverance rover completes first AI-planned drive on Mars

NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover has completed the first drives on another world that were planned by artificial intelligence. Executed on Dec. 8 and 10, and led by the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, the demonstration used generative AI to create waypoints for Perseverance, a complex decision-making task typically performed manually by the mission’s […]

As Rubin’s survey gets underway, simulations suggest it could find about six lunar-origin asteroids per year

Most near-Earth asteroids are thought to drift in from the main asteroid belt. But a small subset may have a much closer origin: the moon. One intriguing example is 469219 Kamoʻoalewa (2016 HO3), an Earth quasi-satellite whose reported spectrum resembles lunar material and which is a target of China’s Tianwen-2 sample-return mission.

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FAA dismisses airline, sonic boom concerns in signing off on SpaceX Starship plans from KSC

SpaceX’s path to launching its massive Starship rocket from Florida’s Space Coast passed another hurdle Friday after the Federal Aviation Administration released results of its nearly two-year long environmental review for launch plans from Kennedy Space Center.

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Cracks on Europa sport traces of ammonia

The search for life-supporting worlds in the solar system includes the Jovian moon Europa. Yes, it’s an iceberg of a world, but underneath its frozen exterior lies a deep, salty ocean and a nickel-iron core. It’s heated by tidal flexing, and that puts pressure on the interior ocean, sending water and salts to the surface. […]

SpaceX seeks FCC nod to build data center constellation in space

SpaceX is requesting permission to launch as many as 1 million satellites into the Earth’s orbit in order to pull off Elon Musk’s latest grand vision of putting data centers in space to do complex computing for artificial intelligence. In a filing with the Federal Communications Commission made on Jan. 30, SpaceX said it’s creating […]

NASA begins a practice countdown for its first moonshot with astronauts in more than 50 years

NASA began a two-day practice countdown Saturday leading up to the fueling of its new moon rocket, a crucial test that will determine when four astronauts blast off on a lunar flyby.

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Powerful Milky Way stellar flares near black hole could refine galaxy center models

Deep in the frozen heart of Antarctica, the South Pole Telescope has been watching one of the most extreme neighborhoods in our galaxy, and it’s just caught something extraordinary happening there. Astronomers have detected powerful stellar flares erupting from stars near the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. These aren’t your […]

New 3D map of the sun’s magnetic interior could improve predictions of disruptive solar flares

For the first time, scientists have used satellite data to create a 3D map of the sun’s interior magnetic field, the fundamental driver of solar activity. The research, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, should enable more accurate predictions of solar cycles and space weather that affects satellites and power grids.

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Bezos’s Blue Origin to ‘pause’ space tourism to focus on moon efforts

Jeff Bezos’s space company Blue Origin said Friday it would temporarily pause flights of its space tourism rocket to focus more resources on its lunar ambitions.

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Puzzling slow radio pulses are coming from space. A new study could finally explain them

Cosmic radio pulses repeating every few minutes or hours, known as long-period transients, have puzzled astronomers since their discovery in 2022. Our new study, published in Nature Astronomy today, might finally add some clarity.

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NASA delays the first Artemis moonshot with astronauts because of extreme cold at the launch site

NASA has delayed astronauts’ upcoming trip to the moon because of near-freezing temperatures expected at the launch site.

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Why are Tatooine planets rare? General relativity explains why binary star systems rarely host planets

Astronomers have found thousands of exoplanets around single stars, but few around binary stars—even though both types of stars are equally common. Physicists can now explain the dearth.

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Exploration of exoplanets: A mathematical solution for investigating their atmospheres

Dr. Leonardos Gkouvelis, researcher at LMU’s University Observatory Munich and member of the ORIGINS Excellence Cluster, has solved a fundamental mathematical problem that had obstructed the interpretation of exoplanet atmospheres for decades. In a paper published in The Astrophysical Journal, Gkouvelis presents the first closed-form analytical theory of transmission spectroscopy that accounts for how atmospheric […]

Kissing the sun: Unraveling mysteries of the solar wind

Using data collected by NASA’s Parker Solar Probe during its closest approach to the sun, a University of Arizona-led research team has measured the dynamics and ever-changing “shell” of hot gas from where the solar wind originates.

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