Space

Given the seeming paucity of moisture in the leftover remains of Earth’s building blocks, planetary scientists have long assumed our planet’s water supply came after it formed in a rain of hydrogen-soaked rocks and comets.A new study by researchers from the University of Oxford and the UK’s national synchrotron science facility challenges the theory that […]

A surprise discovery in Gale Crater is the component that was missing in the puzzle of Mars‘s climate history. There, embedded in the bedrock, the Curiosity rover has identified a mineral called siderite that can only have formed from the precipitation of carbon from the Martian atmosphere. In other words, billions of years ago, Mars had an active

Over 46 years since its release, Voyager 1—NASA’s farthest and oldest spacecraft—has returned a message from the boundary of our solar system that’s disrupting the way we consider the space outside our solar neighborhood. What it confirmed is something scientists have long theorized but never actually established—until now. The interface between our solar system and

Astronomers have stumbled on a black hole roughly 600,000 times more massive than the Sun in a dwarf galaxy next to the Milky Way, according to a new study to be published in The Astrophysical Journal. Researchers inferred the black hole’s presence from the trajectories of 21 hypervelocity stars zipping through the Milky Way’s outskirts, finding that

There is a supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. There is also a lot of other stuff there as well. Young stars, gas, dust, and stellar-mass black holes. It’s a happening place.It is also surrounded by a veil of interstellar gas and dust, which means we can’t observe the region in visible light. We can

 45 years after its launch, NASA’s Voyager 1 is still traveling beyond our Solar System. However, the veteran spacecraft is suddenly sending back unusual data that is baffling its engineers. While the probe is still operational, readouts from its attitude articulation and control system – AACS for short – do not appear to match the

Dark energy, the mysterious force thought to be driving the ever-faster expansion of the universe, appears to be changing over time, according to new observations released Wednesday.If dark energy is in fact weakening, it would likely mean that science’s understanding of how the universe works will need to be rewritten. The new findings come from

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has achieved groundbreaking discoveries in the field of exoplanet studies. In particular, it has made strides in the analysis of their atmospheres by studying light from the parent star as it travels through the gas surrounding the planets.JWST recently observed gas giant planets in the system HR 8799 and