What looks like an aerial shot of an alien landscape is actually a scanning electron microscope view of a test glass surface, acquired as part of a project to improve the lifetime of spaceborne atomic clocks, found at the heart of navigation satellites. Each...

Hey, aliens! Lexington, Kentucky would be a good place to spend your next deep-space vacation.This was the message that a group of Kentucky scientists, linguists and scholars recently beamed at the TRAPPIST-1 system, which lies 40 light-years from Earth and...

heic2402 — Science Release Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have found a rare oddball event in an oddball place. 9 January 2024 A Fast Radio Burst (FRB) is a fleeting blast of energy that can – for a few milliseconds – outshine an entire...

Back to Article List Even under city lights, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn can be easy to see with a small- or medium-sized telescope. This illustration shows the approximate sizes of the planets relative to each other. The planets are not shown at the...

Humans have dreamed about traveling to other star systems and setting foot on alien worlds for generations. To put it mildly, interstellar exploration is a very daunting task. As we explored in a previous post, it would take between 1000 and 81,000 years for a...

The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) spacecraft Einstein Probe lifted off on a Chang Zheng (Long March) 2C rocket from the Xichang Satellite Launch Centre in China at 15:03 CST / 07:03 GMT / 08:03 CET on 9 January 2024. With the successful launch, Einstein...

Astrobotic's troubled Peregrine moon lander has snapped its first photo in the final frontier, and the image holds clues about what happened to the spacecraft.Peregrine lifted off early Monday morning (Jan. 8) on the first-ever mission of United Launch...

Back to Article List The bejeweled gas giant and our planet’s natural satellite will reach conjunction this week in a spectacular evening display. A crescent Moon and brilliant Saturn make a beautiful pairing in the evening sky. Credit: Sérgio Conceição This...

In the late 1980s, the Voyager 2 spacecraft snapped the “canonical” up-close images of Uranus and Neptune. In those views, Uranus was a pretty greenish-blue and Neptune appeared a deep azure color. It turns out that both planets are pretty close in color: a...

Science & Exploration 05/01/2024 3690 views 95 likes Invisible to our eyes, X-rays emitted by the hot gas that fills much of the Universe can shed light on many cosmic mysteries. The 'first light' observations of this gas by JAXA’s X-Ray Imaging and...