Space Exploration

Rogue Black Hole

Scientists have long believed there are “rogue black holes” wandering the universe, but we’ve never had good evidence of one until now. An international team of astronomers has released a study pointing to what appears to be the first roaming black hole, reports Space.com. It was no simple feat to …

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This Star Went Supernova

For the first time in human history, scientists have watched a core-collapse supernova from beginning to end, in real time. The progenitor star was a red supergiant of about ten solar masses, some 120 million light-years away. In its final months, the dying star’s brightness flared dramatically as it cast …

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Potential Exomoon Spotted

In the last few decades, astronomers have slowly but surely added to the number of known exoplanets. Even the largest planets can be hard to spot, though, and moons are even smaller. Well, usually. A team working with data from the dearly departed Kepler space telescope has reported a possible …

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Pebbles Stuck in Perseverance

The Perseverance rover has already made history by collecting the first-ever rock cores on another planet, but NASA says a pebble problem has delayed operations. The rover’s advanced sample collection mechanism has become obstructed by some debris, and the team doesn’t want to continue until it can get the rocks …

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Pluto’s A Planet Again

Like many people, I grew up in a solar system of nine planets. It’s the same solar system we live in now, of course, but the definition of a “planet” changed in 2006 to exclude poor little Pluto and its frosty kin. That was before we’d even seen the little …

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Water Hunting Lunar Rover

The moon is a big deal again. NASA is currently working toward a return to the lunar surface with the Artemis program and the (heavily delayed) Space Launch System rocket. Recently, the Australian Space Agency announced it would cooperate with NASA to send a rover to the moon in 2026, …

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Calling Citizen Scientists

If you’ve ever wanted to help find an exoplanet, this is your chance. There’s a new open research initiative that invites participants to help identify exoplanets using simple visual pattern matching — and it’s open to anybody who wants to help. You don’t even have to own a telescope. The …

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NASA’s Lucy Spacecraft

NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Conceptual Image Lab/Adriana Gutierrez NASA’s Lucy spacecraft is having difficulties with its solar panels. The spacecraft launched on Oct. 16th without incident, and sucessfully unfolded both its solar panels. But only one of its panels successfully latched into position. Telemetry via NASA’s Deep Space Network shows …

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Ancient Space Dust

When the solar system was first organizing itself, a disk of gas and dust took shape around the sun’s central mass. It eventually sorted itself into the system of planets we see today. But there are things we don’t know about how that happened. One observation that has been challenging …

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Planet Orbiting Dead Star

Humanity has existed for 300,000 years, give or take a millennium. That might sound like a long time when the average human lives at most a few decades, but it’s really just a cosmic blink of the eye. Even if Homo sapiens exceeds all expectations and survives both political strife …

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