Category Astronomy/Space

Scientists aren’t entirely sure how life began on Earth, but one prevailing theory posits that persistent cycles of wet and dry conditions on land helped assemble the complex chemical building blocks necessary for microbial life. This is why a patchwork of well-preserved ancient mud cracks found by NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover is so exciting to the mission’s team.

A new paper in Nature details how the distinctive hexagonal pattern of these mud cracks offers the first evidence of wet-d...

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has followed up on observations by the Hubble Space Telescope of the farthest star ever detected in the very distant universe, within the first billion years after the big bang...

The glittering, glitzy contents of the globular cluster NGC 6652 sparkle in this star-studded image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The core of the cluster is suffused with the pale blue light of countless stars, and a handful of particularly bright foreground stars are adorned with crisscrossing diffraction spikes. NGC 6652 lies in our own Milky Way galaxy in the constellation Sagittarius, just under 30,000 light-years from Earth and only 6,500 light-years from the galactic center.

Globular clusters are stable, tightly gravitationally bound clusters containing anywhere from tens of thousands to millions of stars...

Scientists have made the most precise measurements ever of Mars’s rotation, for the first time detecting how the planet wobbles due to the “sloshing” of its molten metal core. The findings, detailed in a recent Nature paper, rely on data from NASA’s InSight Mars lander, which operated for four years before running out of power during its extended mission in December 2022.

To track the planet’s spin rate, the study’s authors relied on one of InSight’s instruments: a radio transponder and an...