Category Astronomy/Space

A device that can harvest water from the air and provide hydrogen fuel — entirely powered by solar energy — has been a dream for researchers for decades. Now, EPFL chemical engineer Kevin Sivula and his team have made a significant step towards bringing this vision closer to reality...

Black holes form natural time machines that allow travel to both the past and the future. But don’t expect to be heading back to visit the dinosaurs any time soon.

At present, we don’t have spacecraft that could get us anywhere near a black hole. But, even leaving that small detail aside, attempting to travel into the past using a black hole might be the last thing you ever do.

What are black holes?

A black hole is an extremely massive object that is typically formed when a dying star collapses in on itself.

Like planets and stars, black holes have gravitational fields around them. A gravitational field is what keeps us stuck to Earth, and what keeps Earth revolving around the Sun.

As a rule of thumb, the mor...

A large volcanic outburst was discovered on Jupiter’s moon Io by Jeff Morgenthaler of the Planetary Science Institute using PSI’s Io Input/Output observatory (IoIO).

PSI Senior Scientist Morgenthaler has been using IoIO, located near Benson, Arizona, to monitor volcanic activity on Io since 2017. The observations show some sort of outburst nearly every year, but the largest yet was seen in the fall of 2022.

Io is the innermost of Jupiter’s four large moons and is the most volcanic body in the Solar System thanks to the tidal stresses it feels from Jupiter and two of its other large satellites, Europa and Ganymede.

IoIO uses a coronagraphic technique which dims the light coming from Jupiter to enable ...

Although dark matter is a central part of the standard cosmological model, it’s not without its issues. There continue to be nagging mysteries about the stuff, not the least of which is the fact that scientists have found no direct particle evidence of it.

Despite numerous searches, we have yet to detect dark matter particles. So some astronomers favor an alternative, such as modified Newtonian dynamics (MoND) or modified gravity model...