Space
- Planetary Science
The Perseverance rover caps off a month of Mars launches
With the launch of NASA’s Perseverance rover, the rush to the Red Planet is under way.
- Space
An Antarctic ice dome may offer the world’s clearest views of the night sky
The highest point in East Antarctica could be an ideal place for an optical telescope, a new study finds.
- Space
To rehearse Perseverance’s mission, scientists pretended to be a Mars rover
Seven Mars scientists pretended to be the Mars Perseverance rover on a training exercise in the Nevada desert.
- Planetary Science
NASA’s Perseverance rover will seek signs of past life on Mars
NASA’s Perseverance rover will collect rocks and search for past life on Mars using lasers and zoomable cameras among other instruments.
- Physics
A black hole circling a wormhole would emit weird gravitational waves
A new calculation reveals the strange gravitational waves LIGO and Virgo could see if a black hole were falling into a hypothetical tunnel in spacetime.
- Astronomy
The star cluster closest to Earth is in its death throes
Gaia spacecraft observations of stars’ motion within and fleeing the cluster suggest the 680-million-year-old Hyades has only 30 million years left.
- Astronomy
This is the first picture of a sunlike star with multiple exoplanets
A first family portrait reveals a weird cousin of the solar system: a star about the mass of the sun orbited — distantly — by two massive gas giants.
- Space
50 years ago, NASA prepared to launch America’s first space station
In 1970, NASA was building Skylab. The orbiting laboratory led to many scientific firsts but was plagued by technical difficulties.
- Astronomy
Pinning down the sun’s birthplace just got more complicated
Many astronomers think that the sun was born in a loose association of thousands of stars. A new study suggests there’s another possibility.
- Astronomy
The closest images of the sun ever taken reveal ‘campfire’ flares
The first images from Solar Orbiter, a NASA-European Space Agency spacecraft, show tiny, never-before-seen flares across the sun’s surface.
- Space
What will astronauts need to survive the dangerous journey to Mars?
Going to Mars, astronauts will need protections from microgravity and radiation, plus miniature medical devices to diagnose problems and help handle emergencies.
- Cosmology
Despite a new measurement, the debate over the universe’s expansion rages on
The Atacama Cosmology Telescope finds the universe is expanding more slowly than supernova observations suggest.
