Items tagged with astronomy
In a study published in the journal Nature, an international team of researchers has detected the first true sugar molecule in interstellar space, giving us a clue that sugar can exist way before planets begin to form.
Using Spain's...
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Japan’s veteran Hayabusa2 spacecraft recently completed a daring, ultra-close flyby of the asteroid Torifune, sending home the first-ever close-ups of a bizarre "two-headed" asteroid located 62 million miles from Earth.
JAXA (the Japan...
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Astronomers at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) have discovered a potentially habitable super-Earth located just 25 light-years away, offering a major new target in the search for alien life.
The newly discovered planet (GJ...
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Astronomers have grumbled about satellite megaconstellations for years, and those complaints date all the way back to the first bright strings of Starlink satellites streaking across telescope images in 2020. A new study from the European...
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Backyard astronomers will be able to use their telescopes to focus in on a massive cosmic visitor when it "skims" past Earth this weekend. On June 27 especially, a large asteroid known as (152637) 1997 NC1 will make a close but entirely...
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Astronomers have finally cracked one of the mysteries of the famous GJ504b Pink Planet, discovering that its signature rosy haze is shrouded in bizarre, swirling clouds of salt.
Located 57 light-years from Earth, GJ504b has captivated...
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Do yourself a favor and look up this afternoon to witness the moon passing directly in front of Venus. Known as a lunar occultation, this rare daytime event offers skywatchers across the contiguous United States, Canada, and parts of Central and South America a chance to see the planet vanish...
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A small stone discovered in the sands of Mali is reimagining what we know about the early solar system. By examining this rare lunar meteorite, planetary scientists have mapped out a sequence of cosmic collisions that retell the history...
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With the help of the James Webb Space Telescope, scientists have discovered the strongest evidence yet that mysterious, early-universe objects known as "little red dots" are actually black hole stars, i.e. rapidly growing supermassive...
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Astronomers may have finally pinned down why some galaxies stop making stars. At a specific mass, they appear to build a self-supporting halo of hot gas that cuts off the cool fuel needed for new star formation, which results in the galaxy...
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If you step outside tonight (June 9) and look toward the western horizon shortly after sunset, you could witness a celestial hookup as Venus and Jupiter appear side-by-side in a rare planetary conjunction.
Due to their striking proximity...
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Astronomers have discovered remnants of a galaxy that the Milky Way gobbled up roughly 10 billion years ago, consisting of "metal-poor" stars consistent with dwarf galaxies.
Space is mind-bogglingly vast. To understand its scale...
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Stargazers, mark your calendars. On Sunday, May 31, 2026, the night sky delivers a blue moon. However, before you picture something out of a fantasy novel, be prepared for a quite normal looking Moon. No blue tint and no cosmic paint job...
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Astronomers have released the biggest ever computer simulation of the universe that gives researchers a fresh way to test how the cosmos formed and evolved. The dataset, built by the FLAMINGO project, impressively contains more than 2.5...
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A revised asteroid calculation may have opened a new expressway to Mars and back; experts believe that we could shrink a round trip to the Red Planet from 14-20 months to more than half of that. The idea comes from a paper published in...
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Astronomers may have finally put a number on one of our galaxy’s slipperiest questions: where the Milky Way’s physical boundary really ends. New analysis suggests the active star-forming disk stops around 35,000 to 40,000 light-years from...
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NASA has tested a lithium-fed thruster that could become a workhorse for future Mars missions, and the key milestone is not just that it fired, but that it did so at power levels no previous electric thruster test in the United States ever...
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A global citizen science project is inviting you to scour through the Euclid space telescope's massive DR1 (Data Release 1) mission. The aim is to uncover possibly thousands of strong gravitational lenses that could aid in our...
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NASA's little busy-bee, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), just delivered another treasure giving scientists an unprecedented infrared look at the interior of the Tc 1 planetary nebula, located some 10,000 light-years away where...
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The Big Bang narrative has had its fair share of detractors. Lately, two theoretical models have gained traction in suggesting equally crazy-sounding yet plausible origins to the birth of our universe. While the standard model assumes all...
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A groundbreaking study has finally quantified the kinetic energy of a black hole’s relativistic jets, and TL:DR, they're far more powerful than previously theorized. By observing the Cygnus X-1 binary system in our galaxy, a team from...
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DESI (Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument) has, in just five years, completed the largest and most comprehensive 3D map of the universe ever constructed, cataloging over 47 million galaxies and quasars plus 20 million nearby stars. This...
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