Data from the Planck satellite reveals the cosmic microwave background. The shape of the universe is one of the most important questions in cosmology, with far-reaching implications, up to and including the ultimate fate of the cosmos. For decades, we’ve…
A NASA illustration shows the Parker Solar Probe diving heat shield-first toward the sun. The probe’s elliptical orbit will take it closer and closer to the solar surface on every pass. The first mission to the sun has reached the…
A student just solved the mystery of why bubbles appear stuck in thin vertical tubes. A university student recently solved a question that’s puzzled physicists for over half a century: Why do gas bubbles appear to get stuck inside narrow…
An artist’s illustration of two black holes merging and creating ripples in spacetime known as gravitational waves. Gravitational waves slosh throughout the universe as ripples in space-time produced by some of the most cataclysmic events possible. With facilities like the…
Our universe is governed by four fundamental forces. At least that’s what physicists have long thought. Now, however, new research suggests that there’s a fifth force, a discovery that could upend much of modern physics. On Oct. 23, researchers at the…
An artist’s rendering shows the ClearSpace-1 satellite using its robotic arms to capture the conical piece of space debris called Vespa. The largest garbage dump on Earth might be in space. In low Earth orbit — the space around our…
Enceladus has strange, parallel “tiger stipes” at its south pole. New research solves some of the mysteries of the “tiger stripes” on Saturn’s moon Enceladus. The moon has been of particular interest to scientists ever since it was observed in…
An illustration shows a small neutrons star surround by a disk of loose material. A twisted little neutron star devoured chunks of its stellar twin, revealing a never-before-seen phenomenon to scientists watching on Earth. Unlike most objects in space (including…
A NASA illustration shows what a system containing a black hole and a star might look like. Two weeks ago (Nov. 27), astronomers published a paper in the journal Nature claiming they’d found an impossibly gigantic black hole not too…
Our home galaxy has a new, super-precise mass measurement: about 890 billion times the mass of our sun. That’s 3.9 tredecillion lbs. (1.8 tredecillion kilograms), a tredecillion being a 1 with 42 zeros after it, or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. That amounts to…
Here, an image of the launch-triggered lightning that struck the Apollo 12 rocket. SAN FRANCISCO — When NASA’s Apollo 12 rocket launched from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Nov. 14, 1969, the sight was electrifying — and not in…
In 2015, astronaut Andreas Mogensen snapped this photo of a thunderstorm from the International Space Station. Dark fluffy thunderclouds don’t just fuel dramatic storms, they also produce some of the most energetic flashes of light on the planet — and…