Japan’s Hayabusa2 mission to asteroid Ryugu. Credit: JAXA Asteroids from the outer Solar System may have brought the building blocks of life to Earth. New research has revealed important new clues as to how the inner Solar System, including Earth, acquired its water and organic-rich components – the essential building blocks for all life. The …
Earth’s sun is a predictable star, and that’s a good thing: if the sun fluctuated in its brightness significantly from year-to-year, the solar system would be a much less hospitable place for life. But while most stars in the universe are as regular as our sun, a small percentage aren’t — and when a star …
Three years ago, a star in Orion inexplicably dimmed. Astronomers finally know why Read More »
Engineers and technicians have been busy with checkouts and final testing of the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft inside the Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The rocket stack made a couple of trips to the launchpad in March and June for the wet dress rehearsal, a test that …
Watch NASA’s mega moon rocket roll out to the launchpad ahead of liftoff Read More »
By firing a Fibonacci laser pulse at atoms inside a quantum computer, physicists have created a completely new, strange phase of matter that behaves as if it had two dimensions of time. The new phase of matter, created by using lasers to rhythmically jiggle a strand of 10 ytterbium ions, enables scientists to store information …
Scientists blast atoms with Fibonacci laser to make an Read More »
The emission from M87 has now been resolved into a bright, thin ring (orange colormap), arising from the infinite sequence of additional images of the emission region, and the more diffuse primary image, produced by the photons that come directly toward Earth (in blue contours). When viewed at the imaging resolution of the Event Horizon …
The photon ring: A black hole ready for its close-up Read More »
Last year, NASA achieved something science fiction writers have been dreaming about for decades: It created oxygen on Mars. A microwave-size device attached to the agency’s Perseverance rover converted carbon dioxide into 10 minutes of breathable oxygen. Now, physicists say they’ve come up with a way to use electron beams in a plasma reactor to …
While the idea of sending humans to Mars was once confined to science fiction, NASA hopes it could become a reality by the late 2030s. One of the main obstacles standing in the way is a lack of sufficient oxygen on Mars. However, scientists have invented a new plasma-based technique to produce and separate oxygen …
Scientists invent new way to produce oxygen on MARS Read More »
Of all the species that humanity has wiped off the face of the Earth, the thylacine is possibly the most tragic loss. A wolf-sized marsupial sometimes called the Tasmanian tiger, the thylacine met its end in part because the government paid its citizens a bounty for every animal killed. That end came recently enough that …
De-extinction company sets its next (first?) target: The thylacine Read More »
In a new study, two University of Chicago astrophysicists laid out a method for how to use pairs of colliding black holes (shown as an artist’s rendition above) to measure how fast our universe is expanding. Credit: Simulating eXtreme Spacetimes (SXS) Project A black hole is usually where information goes to disappear—but scientists may have …
Black hole collisions could help us measure how fast the universe is expanding Read More »
The Tasmanian tiger could be reintroduced into the wild within a decade after a US biotechnology company backed by the Winklevoss twins pledged to recreate the animal almost 90 years after it was declared extinct. The last thylacine, the official name of the Tasmanian tiger that was the Australian island’s apex predator, died in a …
Scientists vow to bring Tasmanian tiger back from extinction Read More »