Moonrise over the Wasatch Mountains. NASA.
This summer is really the summer of the Moon. As we approach the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, many people are thinking about our past and future relationship with our celestial partner. It is the only object in space whose surface can be seen with the naked eye (without going blind ... sorry Sun), yet only two dozen people have even been there. As we look back at our first visit five decades ago, it's worth taking a moment to consider ...read more
A short history of the universe since the time of the Big Bang. We can directly observe more than 13 billion years of change, but the beginning itself is an enduring mystery. (Credit: ESA)
The Big Bang is the defining narrative of modern cosmology: a bold declaration that our universe had a beginning and has a finite age, just like the humans who live within it. That finite age, in turn, is defined by the evidence that universe is expanding (again, and unfortunately, many of us are familiar ...read more
A mockup of the Apollo Guidance Computer that navigated Apollo's way to the Moon. MIT Library.
Driving, say, to a friend’s house, we usually have directions to follow like “turn left at the light then it’s the third door on the right.” The same isn’t true when going to the Moon; there are no signposts guiding the way. So how exactly did Apollo astronauts know where they were going when they went to the Moon?
This one is tough. You can’t just lau ...read more
An artist's depiction of space junk. (Credit: ESA)
SpaceX’s ambitious Starlink
project could eventually launch more than 10,000 satellites into orbit and
rewrite the future of the internet. But Elon Musk’s company has been taking
heat from the astronomical community after an initial launch in late May
released the first 60 satellites. The 500
pound (227 kg) satellites were clearly visible in
Earth’s night sky,
inspiring concern that they could increase light pollution, ...read more
Temple 1 at the ancient Maya city of Tikal in Guatemala. (Credit: Rob Crandall/Shutterstock)
Two trophy skulls, recently discovered by archaeologists in the jungles of Belize, may help shed light on the little-understood collapse of the once powerful Classic Maya civilization.
The defleshed and painted human skulls, meant to be worn around the neck as pendants, were buried with a warrior over a thousand years ago at Pacbitun, a Maya city. They likely represent gruesome symbols of military ...read more
Astronomers think the galaxy NGC1313 may be home to an intermediate-mass black hole. Credit: Gemini Observatory/AURA)
(Inside Science) -- If you have a computer and a few spare moments, you can help search the cosmos for an elusive breed of black hole that astronomers once thought didn't exist.
Black holes come in two main types: stellar-mass black holes, which generally have about 10-24 times the mass of our sun, and the much heavier variant known as supermassive black holes, which c ...read more
An artist's rendition shows the dark matter halo (blue) that astronomers believe surrounds the Milky Way. (Credit: ESO/L. Calçada)
A massive clump of dark matter may have plowed through a conga line of stars streaming around the Milky Way, according to new research presented Tuesday at the 234th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society.
The research, led by Ana Bonaca of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, reveals a curious abnormality in an otherwise uniform strea ...read more
The Large Underground Xenon experiment in South Dakota is one of many projects searching for dark matter and coming up empty. (Credit: LUX Collaboration)
Dark matter, the invisible material that so far shows itself only through the pull of its gravity, was first proposed nearly a century ago. It took another half-century to truly ignite the physics community. But at this point, a plethora of highly advanced projects have gone hunting for dark matter and come up empty.
Now scientists arou ...read more
A hoverfly on a cluster of yellow mustard flowers. (Credit: Dave Hansche/Shutterstock)
Billions of hoverflies from Europe descend on southern Britain each spring. The black and yellow striped bugs are no more than half an inch in length but make the long trek to Britain for the summer.
Once they arrive, the hoverflies pollinate flowers and lay eggs. The fly populations have remained stable unlike those of honeybees and other insects, which have dropped in recent years, researchers fi ...read more
Our Milky Way, shown here in an artist's concept, has strange "ripples" in its outlying regions. New research indicates those ripples were caused by a collision with a dwarf galaxy called Antlia 2. (Credit: ESA)
The Milky Way likely collided with a recently discovered dwarf galaxy called Antlia 2 less than a billion years ago, according to new research presented Wednesday at the 234th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society.
The research, spearheaded by Sukanya Chakrabarti& ...read more
