Category: 2. Space

Roughly 500 million light-years away, near the constellation Delphinus, two galaxies are colliding. Known as merging galaxy IIZw096, this luminous phenomenon is obscured by cosmic dust, but researchers first identified a bright, energetic source of light 12 years ago. Now, with a more advanced telescope — the James Webb Space Telescope that started its observations…

Perseverance’s Three Forks Sample Depot Selfie: NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover took a selfie with several of the 10 sample tubes it deposited at a sample depot it is creating within an area of Jezero Crater nicknamed “Three Forks.” Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS. Download image › Ten sample tubes, capturing an amazing variety of Martian geology, have…

SEATTLE — Luke Skywalker’s home planet in Star Wars is the stuff of science fiction. But Tatooine-like planets in orbit around pairs of stars might be our best bet in the search for habitable planets beyond our solar system. Many stars in the universe come in pairs. And lots of those should have planets orbiting…

When looking at the Earth from space, its hemispheres – northern and southern – appear equally bright. This is particularly unexpected because the Southern Hemisphere is mostly covered with dark oceans, whereas the Northern Hemisphere has a vast land area that is much brighter than these oceans. For years, the brightness symmetry between hemispheres remained…

The night sky has been brightening faster than researchers realized, thanks to the use of artificial lights at night. A study of more than 50,000 observations of stars by citizen scientists reveals that the night sky grew about 10 percent brighter, on average, every year from 2011 to 2022. In other words, a baby born…

Using data from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, scientists have identified an Earth-size world, called TOI 700 e, orbiting within the habitable zone of its star – the range of distances where liquid water could occur on a planet’s surface. The world is 95% Earth’s size and likely rocky. Astronomers previously discovered three planets in…

Saturn’s moon Enceladus is shrouded in a thick layer of snow. In some places, the downy stuff is 700 meters deep, new research suggests. “It’s like Buffalo, but worse,” says planetary scientist Emily Martin, referring to the famously snowy city in New York. The snow depth suggests that Enceladus’ dramatic plume may have been more…

Galaxies that helped transform the early universe may have been small, round and green. Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have spotted “Green Pea” galaxies dating to 13.1 billion years ago. These viridescent runts, spotted just 700 million years after the Big Bang, might have helped trigger one of the greatest makeovers in cosmic…

SEATTLE — Attention alien hunters: If you want to find life on distant planets, try looking for signs of toxic chemical cleanup.  Gases that organisms produce as they tidy up their environments could provide clear signs of life on planets orbiting other stars, researchers announced January 9 at the American Astronomical Society meeting. All we…

In a paper published in the journal, Science Advances, researchers have applied archaeoastronomical studies to demonstrate how the civic and ceremonial buildings in Mesoamerica were largely oriented to sunrises or sunsets on specific dates from the Olmec and Maya regions It is well documented that the Maya studied the Moon, planets, Milky Way, Sun, and…