It’s hard to believe that just four decades ago, we had no idea whether planets existed outside our solar system. Scientists discovered the first exoplanet in 1992, and since then our understanding of the universe has changed irrevocably. Now, scientists estimate that there are as many planets around us as there are stars. The cosmos […]
Read MoreAcross the 75 years since something—something—crashed outside Roswell in early July 1947, the very name itself has taken on a life of its own: Today, it’s shorthand for UFOs, extraterrestrials, and a vast government conspiracy, perhaps even where the very idea of the deep state itself was born. The city of 50,000 in southeastern New […]
Read MoreAcross the 75 years since something—something—crashed outside Roswell in early July 1947, the very name itself has taken on a life of its own: Today, it’s shorthand for UFOs, extraterrestrials, and a vast government conspiracy, perhaps even where the very idea of the deep state itself was born. The city of 50,000 in southeastern New […]
Read MoreTo make maps of these structures, astronomers turn to individual stars. Each star’s composition records its birthplace, age, and natal ingredients, so studying starlight enables a form of galactic cartography—as well as genealogy. By situating stars in time and place, astronomers can retrace history and infer how the Milky Way was built, piece by piece, […]
Read MoreBy the 2030s, if NASA’s and other space agencies’ plans come to fruition, astronauts and the occasional tourist group will frequently visit the moon. Not long after that, they’ll be able to live for extended periods on lunar outposts, much like astronauts do in space stations today. By the 2040s or 2050s, travelers to Mars […]
Read MoreScientists leading the European Space Agency’s Euclid space telescope mission have just released its breathtaking first science images, taken only four months after launch. These new space photos reveal spectacular snapshots of the vast structure of the cosmos, including a massive galaxy cluster in the Perseus constellation, an object nicknamed the “Hidden Galaxy,” an irregularly […]
Read MoreLike any object, black holes take time to grow and form. And like a 6-foot-tall toddler, Fan’s supersize black holes were too big for their age—the universe wasn’t old enough for them to have accrued billions of suns of heft. To explain those overgrown toddlers, physicists were forced to consider two distasteful options. Decades ago, […]
Read MoreIllustration: NASA Their analysis looks convincing, says Andrew Rivkin, a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory who studies the composition of asteroids and who was not involved in the paper. “Short of going and grabbing a piece, like NASA just did with Bennu, this is probably as close to conclusive as we […]
Read MoreA second study, published the same day in Science, shone more light on the mysterious bursts and their variety. This group of researchers, mostly at Australian institutions, spotted the farthest and brightest fast radio burst ever seen. In less than a millisecond, it blazed out as much energy as the sun emits in more than […]
Read MoreEveryone’s into asteroids these days. Space agencies in Japan and the United States recently sent spacecraft to investigate, nudge, or bring back samples from these hurtling space rocks, and after a rocky start, the space mining industry is once again on the ascent. Companies like AstroForge, Trans Astronautica Corporation, and Karman+ are preparing to test […]
Read MoreNASA’s Psyche spacecraft blasted off this morning at 10:20 am Eastern time and is now en route to its namesake metal-rich asteroid. The long-delayed mission will examine the asteroid with a suite of scientific instruments and determine whether the hunk of rock was the core of a baby planet that never fully formed. But that’s […]
Read MoreA rad moon’s on the rise. Early on October 14, our lunar satellite will briefly hover before the sun, obscuring the dawn and immersing millions of people in a strange morning gloom. But this annular eclipse will not be total: Since the moon’s traveling at the more distant part of its orbit, it won’t block […]
Read MoreFollowing him, OSIRIS-REx principal investigator, Dante Lauretta showed four more finely detailed images of the sample all taken by an electron microscope, and spoke more about the significance of carbon. He described them as water-bearing clay minerals which have water locked inside their fibrous, serpentine crystal structures. “That is how we think water got to […]
Read More“It was always clear that satellites would have this effect, because all electronics have this. It’s inevitable. We knew there would be leaked radiation, but we didn’t know till now how much,” says Benjamin Winkel, an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany, who is attending the conference. Winkel coauthored […]
Read MoreRepresentatives from SpaceX did not respond to WIRED’s requests for comment. But Patricia Cooper, a former SpaceX vice president, told WIRED: “SpaceX has put a lot of money, a lot of time, and a lot of thought into its corrections.” Cooper is now the president of Constellation Advisory LLC, a group that advises satellite companies […]
Read MoreDuffy and Haworth speculate that on remote planets, communities of purple bacteria could swell in black sulfurous oceans, or spread in films around local sources of hydrogen sulfide. If they evolved into plants that could survive on land, like Earth plants they would still angle their light-absorbing surfaces toward their star, but they might be […]
Read MoreThe NASA recovery team began by taking samples of the desert ground and atmosphere where the capsule landed. Then they gingerly loaded it onto a helicopter and transported it to a temporary clean room in a hangar on the training range. In the clean room, personnel wore bunny suits covering their clothing, shoes, and hair […]
Read MoreSeven years after it left for the near-Earth asteroid Bennu, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is returning with a celestial souvenir. On the morning of Sunday, September 24, as it passes by Earth the probe will release a canister holding about 9 ounces of space rock. The container will plummet through the atmosphere, its parachute will unfurl, […]
Read MoreOn September 12, ufologist and journalist Jaime Maussan presented what he claimed to be evidence of alien life to the Congress of Mexico. On September 19, Mexico’s scientific community gathered for a conference to ask a simple question in return: “Extraterrestrials or Llama Skeletons?” The answer was right there in the subtitle of the conference […]
Read MoreThe blazing surface of the sun froths with an extremely hot electrically charged gas called plasma. The temperature at the edge of this cosmic furnace runs at about 5,500 degrees Celsius, but here’s the real puzzle: Somehow the sun’s atmosphere, which surrounds that surface like a halo, is 150 times hotter. “Why is the corona […]
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