space NASA and DARPA to Create a Working Nuclear Thermal Rocket by 2027 As noted by NASA, nuclear-powered spacecraft will allow for shorter flight times, reducing the risks for astronauts during long-distance missions, such as future crewed missions to Mars.
space NASA's HiRISE Captures an Image of a Bear's Face on Mars The circular fracture pattern could have been caused by sediment over a buried impact crater. The nose could have been formed by a volcanic or mud vent.
space Astronomers Capture a Radio Signal from an Extremely Distant Galaxy This discovery was made possible by a phenomenon called gravitational lensing, in which light emitted by a source is bent by the presence of another massive body, effectively amplifying the signal, the astronomers explain.
space Scientists Discover Two Supermassive Black Holes in Merging Galaxies It will take several hundred million years for this particular pair of black holes to collide, but the insight gained from this observation could help scientists better estimate how many pairs of black holes in the universe are close to colliding.
space NASA Released an Hour-long Time-Lapse Video Showing 133 Days of the Sun's Life From a series of images taken by cameras of the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) spacecraft, NASA specialists have created a stunning video showing how the Sun's surface has changed over 133 days.
space Hubble Telescope Finds a Black Hole Twisting a Star into a Doughnut as It Swallows It Scientists say that a star is only torn apart in this way a few times every 100 thousand years in a galaxy with a supermassive black hole at its core. These stellar killings are called "tidal disruption events."
space NASA's Orion Spacecraft Successfully Returns to Earth after Lunar Mission Successful completion of the mission paves the way for the second stage of a human return to the Moon, the Artemis 2 mission, when a crew of astronauts will orbit the Moon in the Orion capsule. The third stage is the landing of people on a satellite of the Earth.
space Hubble Captured a Supernova Just Hours After the Explosion In the images, astronomers have seen the early phases of a supernova at different stages. The three images of this supernova show a faint blue spot of a growing flare that is getting brighter and redder.
space Hubble Space Telescope Captures Celestial Fireworks Left by a Star's Death The image shows intertwined strands of blue and orange that are the remnants of the supernova DEM L 190. The structure is located in the Milky Way's companion galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud, and hides a rapidly spinning neutron star.
space Hubble Space Telescope Shared a New Festive Season Photo The image shows a small region of the Westerhout 5 nebula, which is 7,000 light years away from Earth. The luminous image hosts a variety of interesting features, including a free-floating Evaporating Gaseous Globule (frEGG).
space Astronomers Discovered Two Exoplanets That May Be Mostly Water Scientists hope the planets orbiting the red dwarf Kepler-138 won't be the last of its kind to be discovered. As instruments and detection techniques improve, more aquatic worlds like Kepler-138c and Kepler-138d are likely to be discovered.
space NASA Showed How It Will Bring Mars Rock Samples Back to Earth A set of samples from the rover will be reloaded aboard the Mars Ascent Vehicle. It will deliver the samples to a Martian orbit, where they will be picked up by the Earth Return Orbiter and delivered to Earth.
space Hubble Captured a Star-Studded Cosmic Cloud NGC 6530 is a cluster of several thousand stars embedded within the Lagoon Nebula – a gigantic interstellar cloud of gas and dust. It is the nebula that gives this image its distinctive smoky appearance.
space NASA's Webb Studied the Atmosphere of an Alien Exoplanet in Detail The planet's atmosphere is composed of sulfur and silicates. When they interact with the parent star's light, they produce sulfur dioxide – this is the first time such a compound has been found in the atmosphere of an exoplanet.
space NASA Shared a 12-year Timelapse of the Entire Universe NEOWISE has added hundreds of brown dwarfs to its catalog, monitored 1,000 protostars, gas balls hot enough to ignite and become stars, and discovered millions of supermassive black holes at the centers of distant galaxies.
space James Webb's New Image Shows the Early Days of Star Formation The protostar is now hidden in an hourglass-shaped cloud of dust and gas, and it has yet to develop the ability to generate its own energy through nuclear fusion, like the Sun and other stars.
space A Well-Known Ground Detector Can Detect Alien Spaceships A team of American scientists has published a new study, which has not yet passed scientific peer review, in which they propose to use the world's largest detector for detecting gravitational waves LIGO to find alien spaceships.
space The Automated Martian Station InSight Stopped Communicating The InSight space science station, which arrived at Mars in 2018, has stopped communicating. As NASA noted, the last time the spacecraft could be contacted was December 15.
space Astronomers Predicted the Death of an Exoplanet Kepler-1658b is a typical hot Jupiter. It orbits a pro-evolved star of spectral class F, located 2,600 light-years from Earth. The exoplanet has six times the mass of Jupiter, and its orbit is only 0.05 AU (7 million km) from its parent luminary.
space Astronomers Discover a Huge Planet Killer Asteroid Over time, the movement of this asteroid will sync with that of the Earth, and it will cross much closer by, but it will happen centuries into the future. Any asteroid over 1km in size is considered a planet killer and enough to trigger a mass extinction event on Earth.
space Astronomers Created a New Interactive Map of the Universe The full map of the observable universe is actually a slice of cosmos with a thickness of about 10 degrees. However, it still gives an idea of the scale of our universe as well as its stars and galaxies up to 13.7 billion light-years away.
space James Webb Telescope Spotted Two Unusually Bright Galaxies from the Early Universe The galaxies are extremely bright, and one of the reasons for this may be that they could have been very massive, with lots of low-mass stars. Or they could be much less massive, consisting of a smaller number of extremely bright Population III stars.
space NASA Has Finally Launched Its Artemis 1 Moon Mission on Its Most Powerful Rocket The Artemis 1 test mission successfully lifted off from Cape Canaveral on the morning of November 16. The SLS rocket successfully launched the Orion spacecraft and an additional payload into space.
space Astronomers Discover Traces of an Ancient Ocean on Mars Scientists from Pennsylvania State University have found evidence that about 3.5 billion years ago, Mars had a vast ocean, which covered hundreds of thousands of square kilometers of the planet. Its existence was indicated by the topography of the shoreline.
space SpaceX Launched Its Falcon Heavy Rocket for the First Time in Three Years The world's largest operational space launch vehicle lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on November 1. It delivered into orbit several secret cargoes for the U.S. Department of Defense as part of the USSF-44 mission.
