Space

Contrary to a previous report, there’s no evidence of an intermediate-mass black hole in Omega Centauri, the Milky Way’s most massive and luminous globular star cluster, a new study finds. Instead, a hive of much smaller black holes diving into and out of the tightly packed star cluster’s center can explain the movement and distribution […]

For the first time, astronomers have watched gas boil and bubble on the surface of a distant star. Scientists observed the red giant star R Doradus with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, or ALMA, in Chile over the course of four weeks in July and August 2023. The series of images shows large cells of […]

Extreme Climate Survey Science News is collecting reader questions about how to navigate our planet’s changing climate. What do you want to know about extreme heat and how it can lead to extreme weather events? The masses of neutrinos are less than a millionth that of the next lightest particle, the electron, but no one […]

At age 12, Tracy Slatyer felt sorry for a book. She read a newspaper article about how lots of people were buying A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking. “But then … nobody was actually reading it,” she says. “People were just leaving it on their coffee tables.” Determined to rectify this wrong, Slatyer […]

An asteroid hurtling toward Earth could be deflected without a spacecraft ever touching it. The trick is using X-rays to divert the space rock, researchers report September 23 in Nature Physics. In lab experiments, scientists heated the surfaces of free-falling faux asteroids with X-ray radiation, producing vapor plumes that pushed the objects away. Subsequent computer simulations demonstrated […]

Extreme Climate Survey Scientific news is collecting questions from readers about how to navigate our planet’s changing climate. What do you want to know about extreme heat and how it can lead to extreme weather events? If the pair don’t return to Starliner, they could fly again with another crew of astronauts by launching on […]

Extreme Climate Survey Scientific news is collecting questions from readers about how to navigate our planet’s changing climate. What do you want to know about extreme heat and how it can lead to extreme weather events? The quasar is so distant that its light took 13.0 billion years to reach us, so we see it […]

Extreme Climate Survey Scientific news is collecting questions from readers about how to navigate our planet’s changing climate. What do you want to know about extreme heat and how it can lead to extreme weather events? The original “Wow!” the signal was detected decades ago by the Big Ear radio telescope at Ohio State University. […]

A distant stellar nursery holds a cluster of newborn worlds the size of Jupiter, the smallest of which is surrounded by a disk of dust that may one day form moons. The detailed discovery, made thanks to the unprecedented sensitivity of the James Webb Space Telescope, could provide new insights into the formation of stars […]

Extreme Climate Survey Scientific news is collecting questions from readers about how to navigate our planet’s changing climate. What do you want to know about extreme heat and how it can lead to extreme weather events? Since the dawn of the Space Age, when robotic probes first left the atmosphere, scientists have known that the […]