[embedded content] A Successful Test Flight Virgin Orbit, a spinoff of Virgin Galactic, flew its LauncherOne rocket for the first time ever this past Sunday, November 18. The company performed the test flight with the 21-meter rocket strapped to the wing of a modified Boeing 747-400 aircraft nicknamed Cosmic Girl. The 80-minute-long captive-carry test flight took off from California’s Victorville Airport, northeast of Los Angeles. “The vehicles flew like a dream today. Everyone ...read more

An artist’s interpretation of what Barnard’s star b, a super-Earth recently discovered just six light-years from Earth, may look like. (Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser) Perhaps no other star system has elicited so much wonder, mystery and frustration as Barnard’s Star. Astronomers announced last Wednesday they’d discovered a planet in its thrall weighing in at around three Earth-masses, with a frigid, 233-day orbit. The find finally answers whether we have any planetary ...read more

An image from the newly-created virtual reality simulation of a black hole. Inside a Black Hole Have you ever wanted to travel to the center of the galaxy and witness the power of a supermassive black hole in person? With current technology, humans couldn’t travel the 25,640 light-years from Earth to the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole in a single lifetime. Nor could we survive being so close to the extreme gravitational forces of a singularity. But a new vi ...read more

This image shows mound fields. The mounds are found in dense, low, dry forest caatinga vegetation and can be seen when the land is cleared for pasture. (Credit: Roy Funch) Two hundred million mounds of dirt dot an area about the size of Great Britain in a tropical forest in northeastern Brazil. The cone-shaped dirt piles are roughly twice as tall as the average American man and stretch 30 feet across at the base. The mounds, the work of countless generations of termites, rise from the earth ev ...read more

A composite image of the Sun taken by ASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). (Credit: NASA/SDO) Didn’t we all have that “Parent Trap” fantasy, where we’d come across a long-lost sibling that was separated at birth? That dream didn’t go beyond a movie plot for the most of us, but it’s just come true for the Sun. In a rare discovery, an international team of astronomers has found a star that was likely born in the same stellar nursery as our Sun. A ...read more

Meteors are both common and beautiful. But larger impactors can cause devastating harm. (Credit: NPS) We don’t need to be scared of everything that falls from space. In fact, literal tons of space rocks rain down daily, though that’s mostly in the form of minuscule dust grains. But every 100 million years or so, catastrophe strikes in the form of a rock spanning miles. The last one killed not just the dinosaurs, but three-quarters of all life on Earth. The effects on huma ...read more

Damage from the August 31, 1886 earthquake near Charleston, South Carolina. John Karl Hillers/USGS Most people who live in the eastern United States likely don’t worry too much about earthquakes. Most of the shaking that goes on across the country happens on the west coast, running up and down the San Andreas fault zone or in the Cascades of Oregon and Washington. Occasionally, an earthquake will rattle Yellowstone or Oklahoma feels an temblor brought on by waste water being pumped into t ...read more

SciStarter’s very own Jill Nugent blogs about Raspberry Shake! Image Credit: Pixabay Citizen science can be an excellent way to engage learners in the process of science and to address thePractices as outlined in the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). In each issue of the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) Journal, Science Scope, a citizen science project from the SciStarter Project Finder is featured! In the November/December 2018 iss ...read more

The Jezero crater is a paleolake on Mars. Its outlet canyon, carved by overflow flooding, can be seen in the upper right side of the crater. (Credit: NASA/Tim Goudge) Catastrophic Flooding More than 3.5 billion years ago, water flowed freely across the surface of Mars, forming lakes and seas. New research shows how these lakes may have overflowed and burst at their sides, causing flooding so severe it carved out canyons in the Martian surface over the course of just weeks. This new research su ...read more