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See a razor-thin moon shine close to Regulus in the evening sky tonight
NASA losing nearly 4,000 employees to Trump administration's 'deferred resignation' program
How can the James Webb Space Telescope see so far?
Ice in Space Isn't the Same as Ice on Earth
Next time you're drinking a frosty iced beverage, think about the structure of the frozen chunks chilling it down. Here on Earth, we generally see it in many forms: cubes form, sleet, snow, icicles, slabs covering lakes and rivers, and glaciers. Water ice takes all these fascinating forms, thanks to its hexagonal crystal lattice. That makes it less dense than nonfrozen water, which allows it to float in a drink, in a lake, and on the ocean.
Is An Elusive Intermediate Mass Black Hole Eating a Star in This Distant Galaxy?
NASA'S Hubble Space Telescope and NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory have detected evidence of what could be an Intermediate Mass Black Hole eating a star. It's in a galaxy 450 million light-years away, and unusual x-ray emissions highlight its location.
When Moon Dust Becomes a Weapon!
Every time a spacecraft touches down on the moon, it creates a spectacular but dangerous light show of dust and debris that could threaten future lunar bases. Now, after decades of mystery, scientists have finally figured out why these dust clouds form such distinctive patterns and the answer could be crucial for humanity's return to the Moon.
A New Supernova Study Suggests Dark Energy Might be Weakening
Scientists have created the largest catalogue of exploding stars ever assembled, and it's telling us something surprising about the mysterious force driving our universe apart. After analyzing over 2,000 stellar explosions spanning billions of years, researchers have found hints that dark energy, the force making up 70% of our universe, may not be the constant we once thought. Instead, it appears to be changing over time, potentially even weakening!
ExoMars Tests Its Parachute By Dropping From The Stratosphere
Recreating the environment that most spacecraft experience on their missions is difficult on Earth. Many times it involves large vacuum chambers or wind tunnels that are specially designed for certain kinds of tests. But sometimes, engineers get to just do larger scale versions of the things they got to do in high school. That is the case for a recent test of ExoMars’s parachute system. A team of ESA engineers and their contractors performed a scaled up egg-drop test common in physics classes across the world. Except this one involved a stratospheric balloon the size of a football field and a helicopter.
Astronomers Find Five Rocky Planets Around a Small Red Dwarf, Including a Super-Earth in the Habitable Zone
NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) detected three rocky planets around the M-dwarf L 98-59 in 2019. While two are expected to be hot, rocky worlds, the third could be covered by a global ocean. A fourth planet was discovered in 2021, and now, additional study has revealed a fifth planet, a super-Earth in the star's habitable zone.
NASA’s Artemis Albatross
While all the technology of the Apollo program still exists in the form of blueprints and designs, all the human expertise that went into crafting those rockets and spaceships is now either retired or passed away.
NASA's Junocam Heals Its Radiation Damage
The JunoCam on NASA's Juno spacecraft has given us fantastic images of Jupiter and its moons, especially volcanic Io. But the instrument is suffering after years of exposure to Jupiter's intense radiation. There are few options for repairing that damage from such a great distance, but it looks like NASA's done it.
Zero-Boil Fuel Storage Undergoes System Testing
From an engineering perspective, space is surprisingly hot. Or, more specifically, solar energy can make systems that need to be kept at a very cold temperature heat up much more quickly than expected, given the reputation that space has of being cold. In some cases, this heating causes issues with long-term missions, which is why NASA is actively testing a two-stage active cryogenic system to keep one important consumable as cold as possible - fuel.
Astronomers Discover Mysterious Radio Pulsing White Dwarf
A team of astronomers using the Netherlands' powerful LOFAR radio telescope has found a white dwarf that's defying everything we thought we knew about them. Located over 3,500 light-years away, it’s pulsing out radio signals every 14 minutes with a twist, its radio waves mysteriously switch between spinning in circles and vibrating in straight lines. It's like discovering a lighthouse that randomly changes the shape of its beam, except this lighthouse is a star that died long ago and should be quietly cooling in space.