The U.S. government says Russia tested a space weapon earlier this month. Russia says the device, launched July 15, is not a weapon but rather a satellite designed to inspect other satellites. But, the U.S. Space Command (USCC) said in…
Something caused a giant black hole’s bright corona to wink out. Researchers suspect it may have been a collision with a star, illustrated here. Telescopes all over the world watched a bright flash appear around a distant, supermassive black hole.…
An artist’s illustration shows how craters on the moon preserve evidence of its violent past. About 800 million years ago, a flurry of small asteroids slammed into the moon, pocking the lunar surface with clusters of craters. But the moon…
A picture taken on July 19, 2020, shows a screen broadcasting the launch of the “Hope” Mars probe at the Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Center in Dubai. The United Arab Emirates’ probe Hope is on its way to Mars, marking…
A portion of the Atacama Cosmology Telescope’s new image of the cosmic microwave background Ancient light from the Big Bang has revealed a precise new estimate for the universe’s age: 13.77 billion years, give or take 40 million years.…
Left: An illustration shows what a shrouded black hole might look like. Right: An image of the Chandra Deep Field-South (CDF-S) highlights where the new cocooned black holes were detected. More than two dozen missing “cocooned” black holes have…
A tubby tardigradelike shape appeared in recent images of the sun, captured by the NASA and ESA mission Solar Orbiter. No, tardigrades haven’t colonized the sun. But a tardigrade-shaped speck on a solar mission’s images recently led to some joking…
A white dwarf corpse blasting out of a supernova An intimate pair of distant stars had a violent falling-out, sending both careening millions of miles a day toward opposite ends of the universe. Relationships, huh? In 2015, astronomers discovered one…
For the first time ever, physicists have spotted rare, ghostly particles produced by a weird kind of fusion inside the sun. The particles, called CNO-produced neutrinos, traveled from the sun to a detector buried deep beneath a mountain in Italy.…
As the novel coronavirus continues to infect people around the world, news articles and social media posts about the outbreak continue to spread online. Unfortunately, this relentless flood of information can make it difficult to separate fact from fiction —…
Gravity can be a real downer when you are trying to grow organs. That’s why experiments in space are so valuable. They have revealed a new perspective into biological sciences, including insights into making human tissues. Gravity influences cellular behavior…
We are highly sensitive to people around us. As infants, we observe our parents and teachers, and from them we learn how to walk, talk, read — and use smartphones. There seems to be no limit to the complexity of…