space

A heavyweight black hole in our galaxy has some explaining to do. With a mass of about 68 suns, it is far heftier than other stellar-mass black holes (those with masses below about 100 suns) in and around the Milky Way, scientists say. That’s not just a record, it’s also a conundrum. According to theory,…

Two eruptions of gamma rays from exploding stars in far-off galaxies have pelted Earth with the highest-energy photons yet detected from one of these explosions. The shower of light particles reveals how so-called long gamma-ray bursts — among the most powerful explosions in the universe — produce such energetic photons. “This is the Rosetta Stone…

Micrometeroid impacts whacked the LISA Pathfinder spacecraft 54 times in over 4,000 hours of travel. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Looking into the never-ending dark of space, it's easy to think of the solar system as an empty void of nothingness. But in the inner solar system micrometeroids, tiny specks of space dust invisible to…

Tendrils of plasma near the surface of the sun emerge from realignments of magnetic fields and pump heat into the corona, the sun’s tenuous outer atmosphere, a study suggests. The new observation, described in the Nov. 15 Science, could help crack the century-plus mystery of where these plasma whiskers, called spicules, come from and what…

Say hello to Arrokoth. NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute It's official. The most distant world we've ever explored has a new name: Arrokoth, which means "sky" in the Native American Powhatan/Algonquian language. NASA's New Horizons spacecraft flew by the bi-lobed object in the Kuiper Belt at the beginning of this year.  NASA…

Ultima Thule is no more. The remote solar system body visited in January by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft now has a proper name: Arrokoth. The word means “sky” in the language of the Powhatan people, a Native American tribe indigenous to Maryland. The state is home to New Horizons mission control at the Johns Hopkins…

Say hello to Arrokoth. NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute It's official. The most distant world we've ever explored has a new name: Arrokoth, which means "sky" in the Native American Powhatan/Algonquian language. NASA's New Horizons spacecraft flew by the bi-lobed object in the Kuiper Belt at the beginning of 2019.  NASA announced…

Within just 50 light-years from Earth, there are about 1,560 stars, likely orbited by several thousand planets. About a thousand of these extrasolar planets – known as exoplanets – may be rocky and have a composition similar to Earth’s. Some may even harbor life. Over 99 percent of these alien worlds remain undiscovered — but…

A leaky galaxy might be offering up clues about a vast cosmic makeover foisted on the universe during its youth. Within about a billion years after the Big Bang, something stripped nearly all of the hydrogen atoms in the universe of their electrons. This “reionization” puzzles astronomers, who can’t account for all of the energy…

Humanity’s second ambassador to interstellar space has reported back from the frontiers of the solar system — with the message that the border of the sun’s territory is a complex and ever-changing place. Late last year, NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft broke through the heliopause, the boundary where the solar wind gives way to the plasma…