NASA has released a stunning image of a unique crater on Mars with strange, luminous ridges that give it the appearance of a human fingerprint. The crater in the photo is known as Airy-0, a 0.3-mile-wide (0.5 kilometer) depression that sits within the much larger Airy crater, which is around 27 miles (43.5 km) wide. … Read more
In space, rockets zoom around with no air to push against. What’s their secret? Turns out, the engines that power rockets are different than the kind of engines that power aircraft or other Earth-based equipment. Rocket engines carry everything they require into space, rather than relying on air. Like Earthly engines, rocket engines operate using … Read more
Uranus, the seventh planet from the sun, was the first planet to be discovered using a telescope. It is an odd world that tilts over on one side, with thin rings and dozens of moons. In 2022, Uranus was selected by planetary scientists as a top target in the solar system for exploration, and NASA … Read more
No, this is NOT a doorway for Martians. Although the internet erupted on Thursday after a photograph from NASA’s Curiosity rover appeared to show an “alien door,” experts are pretty sure it’s just a natural feature of the Martian landscape. “This is a very curious image,” British geologist Neil Hodgkins, who has studied the geology … Read more
Space is very, very cold. The baseline temperature of outer space is 2.7 kelvins — minus 454.81 degrees Fahrenheit, or minus 270.45 degrees Celsius — meaning it is barely above absolute zero, the point at which molecular motion stops. But this temperature is not constant throughout the solar system. So-called “empty” space — though it … Read more
Dark matter, the elusive substance that accounts for the majority of the mass in the universe, may be made up of massive particles called gravitons that first popped into existence in the first moment after the Big Bang. And these hypothetical particles might be cosmic refugees from extra dimensions, a new theory suggests. The researchers’ … Read more
One side of the moon is littered with far more craters than the other, and researchers finally know why: A massive asteroid that slammed into the moon around 4.3 billion years ago wreaked havoc in the moon’s mantle, according to a new study. More than 9,000 visible craters pockmark the moon, thanks to barrage of … Read more
An area of Pluto that researchers think was formed from the eruption of ice volcanoes is unique on the dwarf planet and in the solar system, a new study suggests. NASA’s New Horizons mission, which launched in 2006, took detailed photos of the surface of Pluto, a dwarf planet and the largest object in the … Read more
In 1676, by studying the motion of Jupiter’s moon Io, Danish astronomer Ole Rømer calculated that light travels at a finite speed. Two years later, building on data gathered by Rømer, Dutch mathematician and scientist Christiaan Huygens became the first person to attempt to determine the actual speed of light, according to the American Museum … Read more
A seemingly intractable black hole paradox first proposed by physicist Stephen Hawking could finally be resolved — by wormholes through space-time. The “black hole information paradox” refers to the fact that information cannot be destroyed in the universe, and yet when a black hole eventually evaporates, whatever information was gobbled up by this cosmic vacuum … Read more
