Category: Space

Imagine going on a weeklong business trip and not coming home until the following year. That may be the situation for U.S. astronauts Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore, whose eight-day mission to the International Space Station has already stretched to more than two months and is likely to go even longer. The pair launched to…

To leave a lasting trail, meteors need to aim low. A new survey of shooting stars shows that meteors that blaze through 90 kilometers up in the sky leave a persistent afterglow, unlike those that burn up at greater heights. Meteors are normally blink-and-you’ll-miss-it events. A particle of space dust leaves a fiery trail of…

The biggest clash in cosmology might be inching closer to resolution, thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope.  Scientists disagree over the universe’s expansion rate, known as the Hubble constant. There are two main methods for measuring it — one based on exploding stars called supernovas and the other on the universe’s oldest light, the…

A lucky alignment of two sun-studying spacecraft may have finally solved a decades-old solar mystery. Data from NASA’s Parker Solar Probe and the European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter suggest that plasma waves known as Alfvén waves inject energy into the solar wind as it leaves the sun’s outer atmosphere, potentially explaining why the solar wind…

One of the most compelling potential signs of extraterrestrial communication might have an astrophysical explanation. Called the “Wow!” signal, the bright burst of radio waves has defied our understanding since its discovery in the 1970s. Now, scientists using archived data from the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico suggest a new possible source for the signal:…

Extreme Climate Survey Scientific news is collecting questions from readers about how to navigate our planet’s changing climate. What do you want to know about extreme heat and how it can lead to extreme weather events? “It’s great to have as many plans as possible, especially when it comes to saving our biodiversity and life…

Extreme Climate Survey Scientific news is collecting questions from readers about how to navigate our planet’s changing climate. What do you want to know about extreme heat and how it can lead to extreme weather events? The quasar is so distant that its light took 13.0 billion years to reach us, so we see it…

Extreme Climate Survey Scientific news is collecting questions from readers about how to navigate our planet’s changing climate. What do you want to know about extreme heat and how it can lead to extreme weather events? The study doesn’t completely rule out an intermediate-mass black hole, but if one is there, it’s much smaller than…

A distant stellar nursery holds a cluster of newborn worlds the size of Jupiter, the smallest of which is surrounded by a disk of dust that may one day form moons. The detailed discovery, made thanks to the unprecedented sensitivity of the James Webb Space Telescope, could provide new insights into the formation of stars…