The Moon’s surface is pockmarked with more than 200 known pits where rocks and regolith collapsed into depths unknown. New research has found that one of those pits, in Mare Tranquillitatis, collapsed into a lava tube and made an underground cave conduit accessible from the lunar surface. “We found a sort of front door to … Read more
Microscopic wormholes may be driving the accelerated expansion of the universe, scientists say. These tiny wormholes are constantly being born from the vacuum of space due to subtle quantum effects. If confirmed through experiments and observations, the wormholes could become a valuable source of information on quantum gravity — a theoretical unification of the fundamental … Read more
The Milky Way is just a speck in a universe filled with an untold number of galaxies. But if we had to take an educated guess, how many galaxies are in the universe? That sounds like a simple question, but it’s anything but. The first problem is that even with our most powerful telescopes, we … Read more
Black holes are massive, mostly invisible and so powerful not even light can escape them. So what would happen if one entered our solar system? It depends on a lot of factors, including the size and distance of the black hole, experts told Live Science. But in many scenarios, not much would happen.”They’re not, per … Read more
Only about 600 people have ever traveled to space. The vast majority of astronauts over the past six decades have been middle-aged men on short-duration missions of fewer than 20 days. Today, with private, commercial and multinational spaceflight providers and flyers entering the market, we are witnessing a new era of human spaceflight. Missions have … Read more
“Warp drives” used by super-advanced alien civilizations may create specific space-time ripples in their wake that we can spot from Earth, a new paper argues. However, the jury is still out on whether the faster-than-light technology is even possible to create in the first place. A warp drive is a hypothetical device that enables an … Read more
The James Webb Space Telescope has discovered the oldest and most distant supernova ever seen — a stellar explosion that took place when the universe was just 1.8 billion years old. The ancient starburst was uncovered among 80 others in a patch of sky that, from our perspective on Earth, is about the width of … Read more
A planet beyond the solar system that has been compared to Spock’s homeworld Vulcan in the Star Trek franchise may have been nothing more than an illusion caused by a jittery star. The extrasolar planet or “exoplanet” (a term for a planet outside of our solar system) was proposed to orbit a star called 40 … Read more
Ever wondered what it would be like to fall into a black hole? A new NASA simulation has the answer — including the inevitable, crushing end. Researchers created the new simulation using the Discover supercomputer at the NASA Center for Climate Simulation. It shows a viewer plunging through the accretion disk of glowing gas around … Read more
A private Japanese company has taken the world’s first close-up photo of an individual piece of space debris, by parking another satellite next to it in orbit. This orbital photo op is the first step in an ongoing mission to capture and destroy potentially hazardous pieces of space junk that are clogging up our sky. … Read more
