Universe

Meet the few astronauts that have set foot on the surface of Earth's lunar neighbor.

The robotic X-37B keeps extending its flight-duration record.

The country's three Shenzhou 14 astronauts have entered the latest addition to their space station home.

A Cygnus cargo mission is set to lift off on Sunday (Nov. 6) at 5:50 a.m. ET.

The Pleiades, M45 are a mainstay of the autumn night sky, an easy-to-find naked-eye bright cluster in the northwest corner of Taurus the Bull. The basic shape of the Pleiades is distinctive, resembling a box with a handle, reminiscent of part of the Plough asterism. The Pleiades, by Callum Wingrove, ...

University offers course to help students deal with eco-anxiety North Devon grassland to become largest created in UK Drinking tea may reduce risk of early death, says new study People who walk faster are reaping health benefits, say experts ‘Wonky’ dog who couldn’t stand on bent legs competes in ...

Growing up Green in Low Gravity Plants Adapting in Space Studies in Space Benefit Earth Humans in space have to eat. In the early days of space exploration, they got to eat paste and drink Tang (or so the legends tell us). That’s hardly a great long-term diet. Plants ...

Researchers using the IceCube Neutrino Observatory have detected neutrinos emanating from the energetic core of an active galaxy millions of light-years away. Neutrinos are difficult to detect, and finding them originating from the galaxy is a significant development. What does the discovery mean? Neutrinos are strange particles. For a ...

The study of extrasolar planets has led to some astounding discoveries, many of which have defied the expectations of astronomers and challenged our notions about the forms planetary systems can take. For example, the discovery of Jupiter-sized planets that orbit closely to their stars (“Hot Jupiters”) defied what astronomers ...

The VERITAS Venus mission had been scheduled to lift off in late 2027.

The U.S. government has officially started to explain some of the most infamous UFO encounters of the last decade, with China and weather balloons as top offenders.

In arguably the show's darkest episode yet, there are some unexpected cameos and even a little bit of mistaken identity

NASA and Boeing had been targeting February for the test flight.

What comes after “we come in peace”? A group of scientists dedicated to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) announced a new campaign to establish a global approach to intergalactic relations. Based at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, their work includes impact assessments and coordination with world leaders ...

The sun is currently sleeping. Its surface and corona are relatively quiet as it prepares to ramp up for an expected phase of high activity in 2025. This past October, the ESA’s Solar Orbiter was able to sneak in a close-up peak at the Sun as it slumbers. On ...

An asteroid 1.5 km across is no joke. Even a much smaller one, about the size of a house, can explode with more power than the first nuclear weapons. When an asteroid is greater than 1 km in diameter, astronomers call them “planet-killers.” The impact energy released from a ...

Our planet is the only place in the Universe known to harbor life, and from the microscopic to the gargantuan, it is positively teeming with it. Yet despite life’s ubiquity, we still aren’t certain where exactly it began. Looking at the chemical makeup of life, we can surmise that ...

"Once again, the People's Republic of China is taking unnecessary risks."

Estes' Falcon 9 comes out of the box ready to fly into the sky or "land" for desktop display.

Interstellar space rocks might be falling to Earth every 10 years.

Kieran Setiya teaches philosophy at MIT, working mainly in ethics, epistemology, and the philosophy of mind. He is the author of Practical Knowledge, Reasons without Rationalism, Knowing Right From Wrong, and Life is Hard.

Entangled drums Entangled people Quantum mechanics and the nature of reality This is the fourth article in a four-part series on quantum entanglement. In the first, we discussed the basics of quantum entanglement. We then discussed how quantum entanglement can be used practically in communications and sensing. In this ...

That's a huge saving on a Nikon camera that we rate as one of the very best on the market.

The many expressions of spirituality Secular and atheist churches Digital spirituality According to a recent Pew Center report, American Christianity remains in a nearly three-decade decline. Responding as “none” or “unaffiliated” on religious surveys, people increasingly identify as humanists, atheists, agnostics, or simply spiritual. If current trends continue, by ...

The following is an excerpt adapted from Life is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way, written by Kieran Setiya and published by Riverhead Books. For more than seventy years, we’ve been warned about a looming epidemic of loneliness, from David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd in 1950 to The ...

Plunge back into the exotic planet of Pandora as the threat of war looms again.

The remarkable drama of NASA's never-say-die Opportunity rover finally hits the big screen.

Water is a fascinating substance. It readily manifests on Earth in the three most common states of matter: solid (ice), liquid (water), and gas (water vapor). The physicists and chemists who study the various states of matter plot them on a chart known as a phase diagram. A generic ...

Astronaut Starry Sky Star Projector review Astronaut Starry Sky Star Projector: Design Astronaut Starry Sky Star Projector: Performance Astronaut Starry Sky Projector: Functionality Should I buy the Astronaut Starry Sky Star Projector? If the Astronaut Starry Sky Star Projector isn’t for you Star projectors are a quick and easy ...

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U.S. Space Command confirmed the uneventful reentry on Friday (Nov. 4).

The November 8th total lunar eclipse spans the Pacific and is the last until 2025. Set your alarms: if skies cooperate, next Tuesday morning’s lunar eclipse on November 8th is worth getting up for and braving the cold. Not only is this one of the top astronomical events for ...

For the second time in 2022, stargazers will have the opportunity to view a total lunar eclipse on Nov. 8. At least a portion of the phenomenon will be visible throughout eastern Asia, Australia, the Pacific, and North America. The previous total lunar eclipse happened in May. According to ...

Rocket Lab USA, Inc. (Nasdaq: RKLB) has been selected by Inmarsat Government as partner to develop and manufacture an L-band radio in support of NASA’s Communications Services Project (CSP). CSP seeks to accelerate the development of commercial near-Earth communications services by partnering with satellite communications (SATCOM) providers. Rocket Lab ...

From the window of a NASA Gulfstream III research aircraft, Alaska looks like a pristine wilderness untouched by humans. The land is covered in lush, green vegetation and dotted with bright blue lakes. Snow-capped mountains reach toward the sky, and chocolate milk-colored rivers snake across the landscape. The obvious ...

For decades, satellites have been instrumental in monitoring our changing climate and improving our understanding of the processes that drive it. But to achieve our climate goals and make Europe the first climate-neutral continent by 2050, we need ideas that take the next step and begin to use space ...

Critical elements of a new instrument attached to the International Space Station (ISS) this summer, and designed to examine the chemical composition of atmospheric mineral dust, is powered by hardware from high-performance electronics company Alpha Data. Data gathered by the NASA instrument – called the Earth Surface Mineral Dust ...

When a landslide buried part of an Islamic shrine in Iraq this summer, killing eight pilgrims, sorrow quickly turned to anger because the site was run without oversight from state or religious authorities. The deadly disaster struck in August near Karbala when tonnes of soggy earth and rock collapsed ...

An international team of scientists, including researchers at the University of Adelaide, have gathered new evidence about the energetic core of an active galaxy millions of lights years away by detecting neutrino particles emitted by it. The scientists have found that NGC 1068, also known as Messier 77, in ...

Rivada Space Networks GmbH, a European network company launching a unique connectivity constellation for Government and Enterprise communications, has issued its request for proposals for 600 low earth orbit (LEO) satellites, having released the RFP for the associated heavy-lift launch services two weeks ago. The company anticipates selecting a ...

China’s space industry achieved a historic new feat on Thursday as the in-orbit assembly of the country’s Tiangong space station’s T-shape configuration was completed. In a crucial, hourlong repositioning maneuver that was completed at 9:32 am Beijing time on Thursday, the Mengtian lab module was moved from one port ...

South Korea’s military scrambled stealth jets on Friday after detecting the mobilisation of 180 North Korean warplanes, Seoul said as it conducted large-scale joint air drills with the United States which have infuriated Pyongyang. North Korea has launched a record-breaking blitz of missile launches this week, including a failed ...

Traditionally neutral Switzerland on Thursday banned Germany from sending to Ukraine any Swiss-made munitions used by anti-aircraft guns Berlin wants to dispatch to the war-torn country. “There is no reason to reply favourably to the German request to transmit Swiss military equipment to Ukraine,” Economic Affairs Minister Guy Parmelin ...

Iran’s plans to supply Russia with weapons including drones and ballistic missiles in its war against Ukraine are “unacceptable”, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said on Thursday. Kyiv and its Western allies accuse Iran of supplying drones to Russia. “We see Iran offering drones and considering ballistic missile deliveries ...

North Korea’s launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile is “illegal and destabilizing,” US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Thursday. Austin also branded the North’s actions “irresponsible and reckless” during a joint news conference at the Pentagon alongside his South Korean counterpart Lee Jong-sup. South Korea’s military said earlier that ...

US personnel are inspecting stocks of American-supplied military equipment in Ukraine as part of efforts to keep track of gear provided to Kyiv’s forces, the Pentagon said Thursday. The United States has committed nearly $18 billion in military assistance to Ukraine since Russian forces invaded the country in February, ...

Chinese astronauts onboard the nation’s Tiangong space station entered the Mengtian lab module on Thursday afternoon, several hours after the completion of the station’s in-orbit assembly. Crew members of the Shenzhou XIV mission – mission commander Senior Colonel Chen Dong, Senior Colonel Liu Yang and Senior Colonel Cai Xuzhe ...

North Korea fired an artillery barrage into a maritime “buffer zone” overnight, Seoul’s military said Friday, after a record-breaking blitz of launches that included a failed intercontinental ballistic missile test. Seoul and Washington, which have warned Pyongyang’s recent launches could culminate in a nuclear test, extended their largest-ever joint ...

Microsoft will give Ukraine an additional $100 million of technology support to strengthen a “digital alliance” protecting the country, the firm’s vice chairman said on Thursday. Brad Smith said Ukraine would be able to use Microsoft’s cloud services and data centres across Europe during the entire 2023. He told ...

Russia and Ukraine on Thursday announced they had exchanged 107 servicemen each in the latest prisoner swap. “Today we are returning 107 of our fighters from Ukrainian dungeons,” pro-Moscow leader Denis Pushilin said on Telegram, adding that 65 of those were from eastern Ukraine’s separatist territories. “We will give ...

A new short volume by veteran science writer George Musser covers the concept of emergence in two domains of physics: the physics of materials (known as condensed matter) and the physics of space and time (known as quantum gravity). Both areas have gone through a mini-revolution over the past ...

SpiderOak, the leader in complete cybersecurity solutions for next generation space systems, has been awarded a contract by the U.S. Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) to deliver the company’s OrbitSecure zero-trust protocol on-orbit. The project will demonstrate end-to-end cybersecurity for the Department of Defense’s future Hybrid Space Architecture, an initiative ...

Astronomers using the International Gemini Observatory, operated by NSF’s NOIRLab, have discovered the closest-known black hole to Earth. This is the first unambiguous detection of a dormant stellar-mass black hole in the Milky Way. Its close proximity to Earth, a mere 1600 light-years away, offers an intriguing target of ...

Leaders of a divided world meet in Egypt on Monday tasked with taming the terrifying juggernaut of global warming as they face gale-force geopolitical crosswinds, including the war in Ukraine and economic turmoil. Expectations are high from a world justifiably anxious about its climate-addled future as deadly floods, heat ...

Police and soldiers on Wednesday patrolled the terror-stricken streets of two Ecuadoran cities after a spate of attacks blamed on organized crime groups waging a deadly drug war. Two inmates were killed and six wounded in clashes inside the Guayas 1 prison, the SNAI prison authority said. Following a ...

First came the torrential rains, which burst river banks, swept away homes and upended hundreds of thousands of lives. Now, in a further cruel twist, the floods that have struck Chad, one of the world’s poorest countries, are hampering people from burying the dead. Many cemeteries in the capital ...

Zhang Yao recalls the moment he realised something had gone deeply wrong at the Chinese mega-factory where he and hundreds of thousands of other workers assembled iPhones and other high-end electronics. In early October, supervisors suddenly warned him that 3,000 colleagues had been taken into quarantine after someone tested ...

A 6.0 magnitude earthquake shook El Salvador on Thursday night, with no initial reports of casualties or material damage, Salvadoran authorities said. The tremor was registered at 10:26 pm local time (0426 GMT Friday) and its epicenter was located 37km off the country’s southern coast, near the town of ...

Early crust on Mars may be more complex than previously thought-and it may even be similar to our own planet’s original crust. The Martian surface is uniformly basaltic, a product of billions of years of volcanism and flowing lava on the surface that eventually cooled. Because Mars did not ...

Brazil’s president-elect Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is facing a tough battle to halt the destruction of the Amazon, with the weight of global expectation on his shoulders before he even takes office. “The Amazon is so damaged, so deforested. We need a plan,” said Luciana Gatti of Brazil’s ...

Chinese local authorities apologised Thursday after a three-year-old boy died of carbon monoxide poisoning when medical care was delayed because of a Covid lockdown, in a rare admission of responsibility. The northwestern city of Lanzhou has been locked down for nearly a month under China’s harsh zero-Covid policy, which ...

Older residents of Saint-Firmin can recall learning to ski on slopes served by one of the first lifts above the village, one that will now be seen only in pictures of days when winter meant abundant snow. Wearing hard hats and T-shirts in the bright autumn sunshine, volunteers recently ...

Gaia BH1 is just 1,560 light-years from our planet.

SpaceX has built and shipped its 200th Falcon second stage, highlighting the often underappreciated rocket’s record of achievement on the ground and in flight. Approximately 13 years ago, in late 2009 or early 2010, SpaceX shipped the first flightworthy prototype of the first iteration of its Falcon 9 second stage. ...

From a scientific perspective, some of the greatest existential questions that have puzzled humans since the dawn of civilization have, at long last, finally been answered. For as long as we’ve been telling stories, we’ve wondered about questions such as: What is the Universe? Where did it come from? ...

In-situ resource utilization is a hot topic these days in space exploration circles, and scientists and engineers have had a great advantage of getting access to new materials from bodies on the solar system that either have never been seen before, such as asteroids or haven’t been visited in ...

There are plenty of exciting places in the solar system to explore. But few are more interesting than Saturn’s moon Enceladus. It’s one of the only planetary bodies known to have all six necessary components of Earth-based life. It has an active ocean and most likely hydrothermal vents, similar ...

Solar sailing seems like a simple concept – instead of being pushed along by the wind, as in a typical sailing ship, a spacecraft can use highly reflective said to be pushed along simply by sunlight. But as with almost all engineering challenges, that technique is much easier said ...

The first manned flight of Boeing’s Starliner space capsule has been postponed again, and is now scheduled for April, NASA announced Thursday. The US space agency wants to establish a second means of transport to the International Space Station (ISS) for its astronauts, with the SpaceX capsule already in ...

SpaceX Thursday put the Hotbird 13G satellite into orbit for Eutelsat to bolster broadcast systems across Europe, Africa and the Middle East. In a statement Eutelsat said, “Once into orbit and positioned, the satellite Eutelsat Hotbird 13G will, with its twin Eutelsat Hotbird 13F launched on Oct. 15, reinforce ...

The simple answer: We don't know.

Essam is a psychiatrist and psychoanalytic psychotherapist who grew up in Israel in a small Arab Palestinian village in the Galilee. He specialized in child and adolescent psychiatry and graduated from psychoanalytic school. In 2015, he flew to Greece for a humanitarian rescue mission where he co-founded Humanity Crew ...

A joint NASA/Italian space mission has put its sunglasses on to observe polarized X-ray light from a corona of hot gas around the Cygnus X-1 black hole.

Guy Snodgrass is the CEO of Defense Analytics, a national security and foreign policy strategic advisory firm specializing in strategy development, government policy, and technology adoption. Recognized as an influential national security and foreign policy expert, Snodgrass recently published his first book, Holding the Line, to incredibly positive reviews. ...

There’s no question that light pollution is a growing problem. Thankfully many scientists and advocates are working for change. And you can be a part of that change with a simple app that you can download to catalog the street lights in your neighborhood. The continued expansion of street ...

Virgin also announced this week that two companies would manufacture parts for the Delta spaceship starting in 2023.

Scientists have long suspected that Mars was once warm and wet in its ancient past. The Mars Ocean Hypothesis says that the planet was home to a large ocean around 4 billion years ago. The ocean filled the Vastitas Borealis basin in the planet’s northern hemisphere. The basin is ...

"If we weren't confident, we wouldn't roll out."

Fifty years ago, NASA and the Soviet space program conducted the first sample-return missions from the Moon. This included lunar rocks brought back to Earth by the Apollo astronauts and those obtained by robotic missions that were part of the Soviet Luna Program. The analysis of these rocks revealed ...

Liftoff is scheduled for 1:15 p.m. ET.

Researchers have accurately measured the height of the eruption plume from the undersea volcano that erupted in Tonga in January. The results confirm that it is the tallest of its kind ever recorded.

Neutrinos are, in many ways, the most difficult species of known particle to detect at all. Produced wherever nuclear reactions or radioactive decays occur, you’d have to make a lead barrier that was approximately a light-year thick to have a 50/50 shot of stopping a neutrino in motion. Although ...

The cloud rose so high that scientists had to explore unusual methods to infer its peak altitude.