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Suspected debris strike delays Chinese spaceship’s return

A suspected strike by “tiny space debris” has delayed the return of the Chinese spaceship Shenzhou-20 and three astronauts, Beijing’s space agency said on Wednesday.

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Trump again taps Musk ally Jared Isaacman to lead NASA

President Donald Trump on Tuesday nominated billionaire entrepreneur and private astronaut Jared Isaacman to head NASA, again tapping the close associate of Elon Musk to lead the US space agency.

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New Zealand plans space mission, satellite fleet: Minister

New Zealand is planning a national space mission which could see a small fleet of state-owned satellites launched into the skies over the Pacific nation, a minister told AFP on Wednesday.

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Trying to find baby planets swaddled in dust

When it comes to finding baby, still-forming planets around young stars, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) observatory is astronomers’ most adept tool. ALMA has delivered many images of the protoplanetary disks around young stars, with gaps and rings carved in them by young planets. In new research, a team of researchers used ALMA to […]

Picture of universe getting clearer—but much remains unknown

Even though we can explore the universe with great precision, there is still a lot we don’t know, according to Ulf Danielsson, professor of theoretical physics at Uppsala University. Besides doing research, he is keen to explain science more broadly—most recently in the book “Människan är ett mirakel” (“Human Life is a Miracle”), a collaboration […]

Simulations suggest the early universe helped black holes grow big, but not in the long run

At the heart of the Milky Way, just 27,000 light-years from Earth, there is a supermassive black hole with a mass of more than 4 million suns. Nearly all galaxies contain a supermassive black hole, and many of them are much more massive. The black hole in the elliptical galaxy M87 has a mass of […]

Webb telescope spies Io’s volcanic activity and sulfurous atmosphere

Trapped in a gravitational push and pull between Jupiter and other Jovian moons, Io is constantly being stretched and compressed. Heat generated by these contortions has melted pockets of the moon’s interior so much that Io is our solar system’s most volcanically active body.

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A space historian explores how the advent of radio astronomy led to the USSR’s search for extraterrestrial life

As humans began to explore outer space in the latter half of the 20th century, radio waves proved a powerful tool. Scientists could send out radio waves to communicate with satellites, rockets and other spacecraft, and use radio telescopes to take in radio waves emitted by objects throughout the universe.

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Want to find more supernovae? Follow the light

Is there anything more dramatic than an exploding star? More than just extraordinarily bright, energetic events that can light up the sky for months, these explosions play important roles in the cosmos. Supernovas create heavy elements and spread them out into their surroundings, where they can be taken up in the next round of planet […]

Taking the moon’s temperature with beeswax

Sometimes space exploration doesn’t go as planned. But even in failure, engineers can learn, adapt, and try again. One of the best ways to do that is to share the learning, and allow others to reproduce the work that might not have succeeded, allowing them to try again. A group from MIT’s Space Enabled Research […]

Astronomers may have found the first stars that formed after the Big Bang

For years, astronomers have been on the hunt for the first generation of stars, primordial relics of the early universe. And now they may have just found them. Ari Visbal from the University of Toledo, Ohio and colleagues believe they’ve glimpsed so-called Population III (Pop III) stars following a detailed analysis of previous James Webb […]

Two FAST-discovered pulsars: Follow-up observations determine their fundamental parameters

Using the Green Bank Telescope (GBT), astronomers from West Virginia University and elsewhere have observed two distant pulsars identified with the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST). Results of the observational campaign, presented October 27 on the arXiv preprint server, deliver important insights into the properties of these two pulsars.

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Video: Seas of the Sun, the story of Cluster

What began with tragedy ended in triumph. This is the untold story of the European Space Agency’s pioneering 25-year Cluster mission to study how invisible solar storms impact Earth’s environment.

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Scientists recreate cosmic ‘fireballs’ to probe mystery of missing gamma rays

An international team of scientists, led by the University of Oxford, has achieved a world-first by creating plasma “fireballs” using the Super Proton Synchrotron accelerator at CERN, Geneva, to study the stability of plasma jets emanating from blazars.

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Pixelized galaxy cluster strong lens modeling improves precision of Hubble constant measurement

For the first time, an international research team led by the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory (SHAO) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has demonstrated that applying pixelized strong-lensing modeling on a galaxy cluster scale can significantly improve the precision of the inferred Hubble constant (H0)—a key parameter that describes the expansion rate of the universe.

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