The moon may look unchanged from afar, but its surface is constantly reshaped by microscopic impacts and a steady stream of particles from the sun, a process known as space weathering. Now, Georgia Tech researchers have recreated one of those weathering sources, solar wind, in the lab—offering new insight into how the lunar surface evolves. Their work is published in The Planetary Science Journal.
Our universe's expansion is still accelerating despite recent claims suggesting otherwise, an international team of astrophysicists says.
A compact, multifrequency radar built by a team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory will make it easier to collect information about dynamic cloud systems. Called CloudCube, this new instrument simultaneously probes the atmosphere with three radar signals, spanning 36 to 240 GHz, for optimized sensitivity to a wide range of water droplet and ice particle sizes.
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman on Wednesday defended the makeup of the space agency's latest Artemis crew, an all-male group.
After only four short years, NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and observational cosmologists like Richard Ellis at University College London (UCL) have pushed the cosmic lookback time to an era when the universe's very first stars and galaxies are within observational reach.
Does consciousness depend on flesh and blood? The answer is almost certainly no, according to Eric Schwitzgebel, a distinguished professor of philosophy at the University of California, Riverside. In a new working paper, Schwitzgebel and Jeremy Pober, a former UCR graduate student who is now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Lisbon, assert that consciousness is likely possible in life forms made of very different stuff. Think of the five-limbed alien with a rocklike exterior in the recent blockbuster movie "Project Hail Mary."
Binary asteroid systems are widespread throughout our inner solar system. For decades, the standard paradigm held that many of them form when a rapidly spinning primary asteroid casts off material, which then reaccumulates into an elongated moon orbiting near the Roche limit.
Private commercial operators are launching more rockets into space, carrying more people and pursuing more ambitious missions than ever before.
Moon missions come in all shapes and sizes, from car-sized rovers packed with scientific equipment to towering rocket payloads—and now, a small, shape-shifting machine that is about the size of the average palm.
Heat waves across Europe and South Asia have dominated the news recently. But these events are really a surface expression of more fundamental changes affecting our planet: Earth itself is accumulating heat faster than ever before.
How supermassive black holes (SMBHs) in the centers of galaxies accrete material, how they feed back into the surrounding region, and how they regulate these processes to influence the evolution of their galaxies are all hot topics in astronomical and astrophysical research. Astronomers are nearly certain that all large galaxies like the Milky Way have an SMBH, and detailed observations of them are where answers will be found. But only some galaxies are readily observed in detail, even by the powerful JWST.
The European Space Agency (ESA) has officially adopted ARRAKIHS as a scientific mission, confirming the target launch date of 2030. Matthieu Schaller is part of the science team: "I look forward to learning more about the dark part of our cosmos."
We may not know what dark matter is, but we keep getting whiffs of it. "We are reaching a point where the observational evidence for dark matter is simply undeniable," said Mayank Sharma, a Virginia Tech graduate student in physics.
Astronomers have discovered a huge reservoir of cold molecular gas, the direct fuel for star formation, in REBELS-25, a massive, star-forming galaxy. The team, led from Leiden University, focused on REBELS-25, seen when the universe was only about 700 million years old, around 5% of its current age. The research is published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Elon Musk is all about big numbers—millions, billions, even trillions—and there are plenty of them associated with SpaceX and Musk's plans to take the rocket maker public.
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