Scientists studying the surface of Mars recently found a piece of the rocky planet smiling back at them. In an image shared Jan. 25 by The University of Arizona (opens in new tab) (UA), what appears to be the face of an enormous Martian teddy bear — complete with two beady eyes, a button nose … Read more
NASA has revealed plans to create a nuclear-powered rocket that could send astronauts to Mars in just 45 days. The agency, which has partnered with the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to design the rocket, announced on Tuesday (Jan. 24) that it could build a working nuclear thermal rocket engine as soon as … Read more
Young stars are surrounded by chaos: Clouds of gas, dust and ice swirl about in a so-called protoplanetary disk. And when gravity binds this material together, planets are born. Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, researchers developed a new technique to measure and date infant exoplanets forming in these protoplanetary disks. By … Read more
Dust collected from the surface of an ancient, peanut-shaped and “potentially-hazardous” asteroid has revealed that some space rocks are much bouncier and harder to destroy than first thought — posing concerns about Earth’s long-term safety. The analysis of three tiny dust particles — gathered from the surface of the 1640-foot-long (500 meters) rubble pile asteroid … Read more
Are aliens using a quirk of the sun’s gravity to transmit information through an interstellar communication network? For the first time ever, astronomers explored this intriguing possibility and scanned for signals coming from hidden nonhuman probes orbiting the sun. So far, the method hasn’t turned up signs of spacefaring aliens, but it represents a promising … Read more
An elusive object in space has posed a riddle for scientists. It looks like a black hole. It acts like a black hole. It may even smell like a black hole. But it has one crucial difference: It has no event horizon, meaning that you can escape its gravitational clutches if you try hard enough. … Read more
Astronomers have uncovered more than 400 previously hidden black holes feeding on stars and dust in the center of galaxies. It appears that many of the new black holes, discovered using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, remained unknown until now because they are buried beneath cocoons of dust. Supermassive black holes, which can be millions of … Read more
An ancient, dried-up lake bed on Mars may be teeming with opal gemstones, new data from NASA’s Mars Curiosity rover suggests. Beyond giving the cracked surface of Mars’ Gale Crater a semiprecious glint, these opals could be evidence that water and rock have been interacting beneath the Martian surface much more recently than was previously … Read more
Black holes form natural time machines that allow travel to both the past and the future. But don’t expect to be heading back to visit the dinosaurs any time soon. At present, we don’t have spacecraft that could get us anywhere near a black hole. But, even leaving that small detail aside, attempting to travel into … Read more
Black holes are scary beasts — objects so massive that not even light can escape their clutches. In 2022, we learned more about these gravitational monsters than ever before — from the first direct image of the black hole “heart” at the center of the Milky Way to one of the earliest black hole ancestors … Read more
