On August 30, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope successfully launched from Florida and will spend the next three months heading to its new home: a Sun-Earth Lagrange point, a million miles from Earth, where the gravity of the two largest bodies is in balance. It’s a comfortable place for a space telescope; Roman can … Read more
China has achieved two-way laser communication between the Earth and the Moon, making it the second nation after the United States to do so. But the data rates it achieved were far behind those recorded by NASA more than a decade ago, and that has left space experts scratching their heads. Using telescopes in Yunnan … Read more
Long before astronauts plant a seed on the Moon or Mars, NASA has been testing a much simpler question here on Earth’s doorstep: What happens when a corn seed germinates without gravity telling it which direction to grow? In the early 1990s, researchers flew dried corn kernels aboard the space shuttle, let them sprout in … Read more
After traveling together as a joint spacecraft for eight years, the twin BepiColombo orbiters will finally be forced to separate when they reach their destination. BepiColombo, a joint mission between the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), is preparing for a challenging separation sequence that will take it from one … Read more
Saturn’s rings seem to have always been there. Every photo of the solar system shows them front and center, thin golden bands wrapped around a giant planet, and it’s easy to assume they arrived the same week Saturn itself did, four and a half billion years ago. That assumption turns out to be wrong, and … Read more
The night sky tonight and on any clear night offers an ever-changing display of fascinating objects you can see, from stars and constellations to bright planets, the moon, and sometimes special events like meteor showers.Observing the night sky can be done with no special equipment, although a sky map can be very useful, and a … Read more
Space microbes have driven the plots of sci-fi mainstays like “Project Hail Mary” and “The Andromeda Strain.” But with more space missions launching each year, finding extraterrestrial life in microbial form is increasingly plausible. What will be the response here on Earth if – or when – scientists discover extraterrestrial microbes? Will the international political … Read more
Almost 35 years of seismic data. More than two million waveforms from approximately 5,000 earthquakes of magnitude 6 or greater. Manual analysis had examined this file for decades and kept missing something. A deep learning system developed by researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences did not. It identified approximately 174,929 weak seismic signals (more … Read more
The Florida Everglades are a vast subtropical wilderness of salt marshes, mangrove forests, cypress trees, and slow-moving waters. But beneath its seemingly tranquil surface lives an extraordinary collection of predators. Alligators lurk almost completely submerged, venomous snakes disappear into the vegetation, and huge invasive pythons squeeze the life out of their prey. Even sharks can … Read more
The main LUX-ZEPLIN detector in a surface laboratory before its underground installation. Researchers now report that they have found an unexplained phenomenon that could be direct proof of the existence of dark matter. Matthew Kapust/Sanford Underground Research Facility The LZ dark matter detector was placed nearly a mile underground in a former gold mine at … Read more