space

The Virtual Telescope Project caught sight of the first-known intervenusian asteroid, 2020 AV2. The arrow points to the asteroid. Gianluca Masi/Virtual Telescope Project The Virtual Telescope Project's image of asteroid 2020 AV2 isn't much of a looker, but the small dot pointed out by an arrow is a big new discovery. It's the first known…

SpaceX and NASA are working together to blow up a rocket over the Atlantic Ocean. The experiment, called an in-flight abort test, will likely lead to the destruction of a Falcon 9 rocket in what SpaceX is referring to as “rapid scheduled disassembly.” That test was supposed to happen this week but has since been…

HONOLULU – A cluster of young stars in the Milky Way is hanging out where it seemingly shouldn’t exist. Our galaxy is enveloped in an extensive halo of old stars and hot gas — gas which can’t cool down enough to clump together and form new stars. And yet, a flock of relatively new stars…

NASA's Terra satellite captured this image of Kangaroo Island on Jan. 7 showing burn scars and active fires. NASA Worldview Kangaroo Island off of Australia's southern coast was a paradise filled with forests and nature reserves, but it hasn't been immune to the bushfire epidemic that has swept across the mainland. A new NASA satellite…

Stephen Hawking passed away on 14 March 2018. His work changed literally everything we know about the cosmos and our place in it. But his greatest contribution to our species wasn’t his theories on black holes or how quickly the universe was expanding, it was his humanity. Professor Hawking was born on 8 January 1942.…

Rogue waves. Floating magnetic islands. Charged particle showers. These are just some of the things NASA’s Parker Solar Probe witnessed during its first two close encounters with the sun. Parker is on a nearly seven-year mission to repeatedly soar close to the sun. There, it will gather intel on mysteries that have stumped scientists for…

HONOLULU – A trio of bubble-blowing galaxies may offer clues about one of the greatest cosmic makeovers in the history of the universe. Sometime during the universe’s first billion or so years, most of the hydrogen atoms in the cosmos became ionized when their electrons were torn away (SN: 11/7/19). Astronomers suspect that this reionization…

Brief, brilliant flashes of radio waves have been traced back to a galaxy that looks like the Milky Way — a radically different environment from where astronomers have seen similar radio flares before. Until now, the only source known for a recurrent fast radio burst like this was a tiny, star-forming dwarf galaxy (SN: 1/4/17),…

A pulsar in the Milky Way is ready for its close-up. Two teams of astronomers independently have gotten the first glimpses of the surface of a pulsar, a rapidly spinning neutron star. Newly created maps of that surface reveal a smattering of bright blemishes in the star’s southern hemisphere, hinting at the presence of complex…

Never-before-seen radio waves from tens of thousands of galaxies have a secret to share: The height of star formation in the cosmos may have been more prolific than previously imagined. Radio telescopes are good probes of star formation. But until now, they haven’t been sensitive enough to see radio waves coming from the vast majority…