Category Astronomy/Space

A small team of astrophysicists at the University of California, Los Angeles, working with colleagues from the University of Texas at Dallas and the University of Colorado, Boulder, has found evidence that Alfvén waves in space plasmas speed up ion beams, resulting in the creation of small-scale acoustic waves that in turn generate heat in the magnetosphere.

In their study, published in the journal Physical Review Letters, the group used data from the four-spacecraft Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission that took place in 20...

A Neptune-sized planet, TOI-3261 b, makes a scorchingly close orbit around its host star. Only the fourth object of its kind ever found, the planet could reveal clues as to how planets such as these form.

An international team of scientists used the NASA space telescope, TESS (the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite), to discover the exoplanet, then made further observations with ground-based telescopes in Australia, Chile, and South Africa. The measurements placed the new planet squarely in the “hot Neptune desert”—a category of planets with so few members that their scarcity evokes a deserted landscape.

The team, led by astronomer Emma Nabbie of the University of Southern Queensland, pu...

A new computer model can be used to detect and measure interior oceans on the ice covered moons of Uranus. The model works by analyzing orbital wobbles that would be visible from a passing spacecraft. The research gives engineers and scientists a slide-rule to help them design NASA’s upcoming Uranus Orbiter and Probe mission.

When NASA’s Voyager 2 flew by Uranus in 1986, it captured grainy photographs of large ice-covered moons...

Distant, ancient galaxies are giving scientists more hints that a mysterious force called dark energy may not be what they thought.

Astronomers know that the universe is being pushed apart at an accelerating rate and they have puzzled for decades over what could possibly be speeding everything up. They theorize that a powerful, constant force is at play, one that fits nicely with the main mathematical model that describes how the universe behaves...