Lots of Tatooine-like planets around binary stars may be habitable
SEATTLE — Luke Skywalker’s home planet in Star Wars is the stuff of science fiction. But Tatooine-like planets in orbit around pairs of stars might…
SEATTLE — Luke Skywalker’s home planet in Star Wars is the stuff of science fiction. But Tatooine-like planets in orbit around pairs of stars might…
Saturn’s moon Enceladus is shrouded in a thick layer of snow. In some places, the downy stuff is 700 meters deep, new research suggests. “It’s…
Galaxies that helped transform the early universe may have been small, round and green. Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have spotted “Green Pea”…
SEATTLE — Attention alien hunters: If you want to find life on distant planets, try looking for signs of toxic chemical cleanup. Gases that organisms…
CHICAGO — An entire ocean of liquid magma, or maybe a hot heart of solid metal, may lurk in Io’s underworld. The surface of Jupiter’s…
Thanks to a bit of good luck, the Mars rover Perseverance has captured the first-ever sound of a Martian dust devil. The NASA rover has…
NASA’s Orion passenger space capsule has passed a huge test, splashing down intact in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Mexico on December 11.…
Astronomers have spotted a bright gamma-ray burst that upends previous theories of how these energetic cosmic eruptions occur. For decades, astronomers thought that GRBs came…
When astronaut Eugene Cernan stepped from the moon’s surface into his spacecraft in December 1972, he was aware it was the end of an era.…
For the first time, astronomers have observed how certain supermassive black holes launch jets of high-energy particles into space — and the process is shocking.…
We’ve never seen images of space as astounding as those from the James Webb Space Telescope, which shared its first cosmic vistas in July. The…
Late in the evening of February 28, 2021, a coal-dark space rock about the size of a soccer ball fell through the sky over northern…
Fifty years ago, three NASA astronauts splashed down in the Pacific Ocean, concluding the final Apollo mission. Less than a dozen years after President John…
We’ve now seen farther, deeper and more clearly into space than ever before. The first image from the James Webb Space Telescope, released in a…
The months-long process of preparing NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope for science is now complete. All of the seventeen ways or ‘modes’ to operate Webb’s…
Clouds of sand can condense, grow and disappear in some extraterrestrial atmospheres. A new look at old data shows that clouds made of hot silicate…
Three of the four science instruments on NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have completed their commissioning activities and are ready for science. Each of Webb’s…
If every mineral tells a story, then geologists now have their equivalent of The Arabian Nights. For the first time, scientists have cataloged every different…
PASADENA, Calif. — A lucky celestial alignment has given astronomers a rare look at a galaxy in the early universe that is seeding its surroundings…
PASADENA, Calif. — The faint dwarf galaxies in a nearby galaxy group seem to have missed the memo. Instead of being dispersed evenly around the…
After two decades of debate, scientists are getting closer to figuring out exactly what the sun — and thus the whole universe — is made…
A solitary celestial object — more massive than the sun, yet far smaller — is wandering the galaxy a few thousand light-years from Earth. It…
1.6 billion stars. 11.4 million galaxies. 158,000 asteroids. One spacecraft. The European Space Agency’s Gaia space observatory, which launched in 2013, has long surpassed its…
Samples of the asteroid Ryugu are the most pristine pieces of the solar system that scientists have in their possession. A new analysis of Ryugu…
Astronomers have added a new species to the neutron star zoo, showcasing the wide diversity among the compact magnetic remains of dead, once-massive stars. The…
A busy week for science in Moscow — Science News, June 3, 1972 U.S. and Soviet leaders … signed agreements on space, science and technology, health and…
A spacecraft has spied a spiky “hedgehog” on the sun and watched a solar flare in ways never done before. The Solar Orbiter, a collaboration…
Four billion years ago, lava spilled onto the moon’s crust, etching the man in the moon we see today. But the volcanoes may have also…
The windy and chaotic remains surrounding recently exploded stars may be launching the fastest particles in the universe. Highly magnetic neutron stars known as pulsars…
Any Martians out there should learn to duck and cover. On May 4, the Red Planet was rocked by a roughly magnitude 5 temblor, the…
In the solar system’s early years, the still-forming giant planets sidestepped, did a do-si-do and then swung one of their partners away from the sun’s…
Cometary evidence of a planet beyond Pluto — Science News, May 6, 1972 There have been suggestions that our solar system might have a tenth…
On Jupiter’s moon Io, lava creeping beneath frost may give rise to fields of towering dunes. That finding, described April 19 in Nature Communications, suggests…
If you’re an aspiring life-form, you might want to steer clear of planets around orange dwarf stars. Some astronomers have called these orange suns “Goldilocks…
The continuing search for life beyond Earth is driving many of the priorities for what’s next when it comes to U.S. planetary exploration. In a…
Europa’s frozen surface is covered with distinctive pairs of ridges that straddle troughs of ice. These double ridges are the most common features on the…
One year ago, Ingenuity took its first flight on Mars. And its story since is that of a real-world little helicopter that could. Ingenuity traveled…
Fragmenting planets sweeping extremely close to their stars might be the cause of mysterious cosmic blasts of radio waves. Milliseconds-long fast radio bursts, or FRBs,…
A young, massive planet is orbiting in an unusual place in its star system, and it’s leading researchers to revive a long-debated view of how…
The nucleus of a comet discovered in 2014 is the largest ever spotted. The “dirty snowball” at the center of comet C/2014 UN271 is about…
Neptune’s atmospheric temperature is on an unexpected roller-coaster ride, and it could take decades for scientists to piece together what’s happening at the distant planet.…
On Mars, the speed of sound depends on its pitch. All sound travels slower through Mars’ air compared with Earth’s. But the higher-pitched clacks of…
A chance alignment may have revealed a star from the universe’s first billion years. If confirmed, this star would be the most distant one ever…
As astronomy datasets grow larger, scientists are scouring them for black holes, hoping to better understand the exotic objects. But the drive to find more…
Like two great songwriters working side by side and inspiring each other to create their best work, the Magellanic Clouds spawn new stars every time…
A new analysis of nearly a quarter million stars puts firm ages on the most momentous pages from our galaxy’s life story. Far grander than…
It’s official: The number of planets known beyond our solar system has just passed 5,000. The exoplanet census surpassed this milestone with a recent batch…
Even when you remove the bright stars, the glowing dust and other nearby points of light from the inky, dark sky, a background glow remains.…
A treasure trove of diamonds may be sown into Mercury’s cratered crust. Billions of years of meteorite impacts may have flash-baked much of Mercury’s surface…
Coronal loops, well-defined hot strands of plasma that arch out into the sun’s atmosphere, are iconic to the sun’s imagery. But many of the supposed…
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