Latest science news in Astronomy & Space
Planetary Exploration Science Technology Office
This blog post originated in the 2018 Science Mission Directorate Science and Technology Report. PROJECT Planetary Exploration Science Technology Office (PESTO) KEY POINTS A new office has been created to manage the development of...
'Inside the Actors Studio' host James Lipton dies
James Lipton, best known for creating "Inside the Actors Studio" and hosting it for 23 seasons, died Monday at 93.
Watch live: Space startup Astra plans challenge launch from Alaska
A space startup company, California-based Astra, plans to launch a rocket carrying small satellites from Alaska as part of a prize-based government challenge at 3:30 p.m. EST Monday.
Watch: Sungjae shares animated 'Come with the Wind' video
K-pop star Yook Sung-jae released an animated music video for the new solo single "Come with the Wind."
Watch: Rapman narrates trailer for new film 'Blue Story'
"Blue Story," a new film written and directed by Rapman and starring Stephen Odubola and Micheal Ward, opens in theaters March 20.
Watch: 'Elite' Season 3 trailer teases Polo's murder
"Elite," starring Itzan Escamilla, Miguel Bernardeau, Álvaro Rico, Arón Piper and Mina El Hammani, returns March 13 on Netflix.
Two stars merged to form massive white dwarf
A massive white dwarf star with a bizarre carbon-rich atmosphere could be two white dwarfs merged together, and only narrowly avoided destruction.
Oddball giant white dwarf may have formed in epic crash of smaller stars
A giant white dwarf star may be the offspring of a collision between two other white dwarfs, a new study finds.
Milky Way’s warp caused by galactic collision, Gaia suggests
Astronomers have pondered for years why our galaxy, the Milky Way, is warped. Data from ESA’s star-mapping satellite Gaia suggest the distortion might be caused by an ongoing collision with...
Huge 'space snowman' is two merging stars
Researchers have discovered an unusual ultra-massive snowman-shaped star with an atmospheric composition never seen before.
Scientists seize rare chance to watch faraway star system evolve
Findings suggest that the planet DS Tuc Ab -- which orbits a star in a binary system -- formed without being heavily impacted by the gravitational pull of the second...
Two stars merged to form massive white dwarf
A massive white dwarf star with a bizarre carbon-rich atmosphere could be two white dwarfs merged together according to an international team led by University of Warwick astronomers, and only...
Early Earth may have been a 'waterworld'
Kevin Costner, eat your heart out. New research shows that the early Earth, home to some of our planet's first lifeforms, may have been a real-life "waterworld"— without a continent...
OSIRIS-REx students catch unexpected glimpse of black hole
University students and researchers working on a NASA mission orbiting a near-Earth asteroid have made an unexpected detection of a phenomenon 30 thousand light years away. Last fall, the student-built...
First direct observation of elusive waves reveals energy channels in solar atmosphere
For the first time, torsional Alfvén waves have been directly observed in the solar corona by a team of researchers from the University of Oslo and the University of Warwick....
Image: Hubble spots a spiral with a past
This image of an archetypal spiral galaxy was captured by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.
Researchers review methods for sky view factor estimation
The sky view factor (SVF) is a geometric concept that refers to the ratio of the radiation received by a planar surface to the radiation emitted by the entire hemispheric...
UBC astronomy student finds 17 new possible planets, 1 may have water
Michelle Kunimoto scours space for undiscovered planets. And she’s just uncovered 17 new possible ones, including a potentially habitable, Earth-sized world.
Researchers find string theory link in a class of complex numbers
A collaboration of a mathematician and a physicist has shown that the modular forms associated with elliptic curves with complex multiplications are expressed in terms of observables in superstring theory.
Riding the wave of a supernova to go interstellar
When it comes to the challenges posed by interstellar travel, there are no easy answers. The distances are immense, the amount of energy needed to make the journey is tremendous,...
Watch: Clare Crawley announced as new 'Bachelorette'
Clare Crawley was announced as the new "Bachelorette" Monday on "Good Morning America."
X-ray quasi-periodic eruptions detected in the galaxy RX J1301.9+2747
Astronomers have performed observations of a galaxy known as RX J1301.9+2747 using ESA's XMM-Newton spacecraft. The study unveiled three strong and rapid X-ray quasi-periodic eruptions (QPEs) in the nucleus of...
Meteorite observation network sets out to catch a falling star
British scientists are turning their eyes to the skies to track meteorites before they land on UK soil—and they're looking for volunteers to help them recover the space rocks whenever...
Ultrared, dusty star-forming galaxies in the early universe
Star formation takes place within natal clouds of dust and gas that absorb much of the emitted ultraviolet and optical radiation but which also block these regions from optical view. In recent decades,...
Scientists seize rare chance to watch faraway star system evolve
At only 1% the age of the sun, the DS Tuc binary system shows us how a planet might naturally develop before its orbit is disturbed by external forces.
Meet LUVOIR, which might become NASA's next big space telescopes
NASA faces a difficult choice: What does the agency want to select as its next big space telescope, the instrument that will shape scientists' research in the 2040s?
Star maps through the ages: A Q&A with the author of 'The Sky Atlas'
Sure, humans have looked to the stars for millennia, but it's still difficult to step into the shoes of all those people.
See Mars with Jupiter and Saturn in the dawn sky in March
This is a good week to check out progress of the planet Mars as it continues toward an unusually close approach to the Earth in early fall.