NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft just took the farthest-ever images from Earth, breaking an earlier record set by Voyager 1’s “Pale Blue Dot” image taken almost exactly 28 years ago. In December 2017, New Horizons took these false-color images of objects in the Kuiper Belt, the farthest from Earth ever captured by a spacecraft. They’re also […]
Read More NASA Just Published the Farthest-Ever Images Taken in SpaceBy Matt Williams On July 2nd, 1967, the U.S. Vela 3 and 4 satellites noticed something rather perplexing. Originally designed to monitor for nuclear weapons tests in space by looking for gamma radiation, these satellites picked up a series of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) coming from deep space. And while decades have passed since the “Vela Incident“, astronomers are still […]
Read More Physicists Have Created an Artificial Gamma Ray Burst in the LabBy Jay Bennett The Hypatia stone is only a few centimeters across, broken into pebble fragments, but it may very well be the most interesting rock in the world. Named for Hypatia of Alexandria, the first prominent Western woman astronomer and mathematician, the colorful rock was found in 1996 in western Egypt by Aly Barakat, […]
Read More ‘Hypatia’ Stone Contains Compounds Not Found in the Solar SystemIN BRIEF Using data collected from their network of telescopes, the Event Horizons Telescope team hopes to produce the first ever image of a black hole in 2018. FIRST LOOK AT A BLACK HOLE Within the next 12 months, astrophysicists believe they’ll be able to do something that’s never been done before, and it could […]
Read More This Year, We’ll See a Black Hole for the First TimeBy Mara Johnson-Groh The space high above Earth may seem empty, but it’s a carnival packed with magnetic field lines and high-energy particles. This region is known as the magnetosphere and, every day, charged particles put on a show as they dart and dive through it. Like tiny tightrope walkers, the high-energy electrons follow the […]
Read More NASA Studies the MagnetosphereBy David Plotz Being an astronaut is not all zero-gravity gymnastics and big blue marble flyovers. There’s also all the time spent repairing the urine collector and hunting for lost screws. Scott Kelly’s delightful new memoir, Endurance: A Year in Space, A Lifetime of Discovery, chronicles the mundane, frustrating, and surprisingly funny reality of life on the […]
Read More Scott Kelly: An Astronaut’s Exit InterviewBy Anastasia Stepanova (translated from Russian) … And here we are flying over the uninhabited island of Devon and we observe a strange picture: in the distance below, a few white points swish. Common sense suggests: these are the most dangerous inhabitants of the Arctic – polar bears. But the closer the plane to the middle of the […]
Read More The Mars 160 ProgramBy Doris Elin Salazar If you’ve ever wondered what kind of weather Jon Snow faces as he fights against White Walkers in the hit television fantasy series “Game of Thrones,” the conditions are about the same as they are in Fairbanks, Alaska, according to a new climate simulation of the fictitious realm. Plus, dragons scorching up Westeros […]
Read More ‘Game of Thrones’ Climate Simulator Explains Crazy Weather of WesterosBy Himanshu Goenka An unusual star about 550 light-years away in the constellation Pisces is known for its erratic dimming episodes, but it turns out RZ Piscium may also be doing something else not commonly seen. The star may be actively destroying the planets and planetesimals in orbit around it and then consuming the remains. […]
Read More A Cannibal StarBy Mike McCrae Astronomers have produced a clear snapshot of a 2.3 light-year long ‘thread’ snaking around the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way. The structure itself was discovered back in 2012, but the new image reveals the long line seems to be fairly intimate with the dark heart of our galaxy. […]
Read More There’s a Weird String at the Center of Our Galaxy
