Category Astronomy/Space

An enormous comet – approximately 80 miles across, more than twice the width of Rhode Island – is heading our way at 22,000 miles per hour from the edge of the solar system. Fortunately, it will never get closer than 1 billion miles from the sun, which is slightly farther from Earth than Saturn; that will be in 2031.

Comets, among the oldest objects in the solar system, are icy bodies that were unceremoniously tossed out of the solar system in a gravitational pinball game among the massive outer planets, said David Jewitt. The UCLA professor of planetary science and astronomy co-authored a new study of the comet in the Astrophysical Journal Letters...

New research led by space scientists at the University of Leice...

New research shows how the impact that created the Moon’s South Pole – Aitken basin is linked to the stark contrast in composition and appearance between the two sides of the Moon.

The face that the Moon shows to Earth looks far different from the one it hides on its far side. The nearside is dominated by the lunar mare – the vast, dark-colored remnants of ancient lava flows. The crater-pocked farside, on the other hand, is virtually devoid of large-scale mare features. Why the two sides are so different is one of the Moon’s most enduring mysteries.

Now, researchers have a new explanation for the two-faced Moon – one that relates to a giant impact billions of years ago near the Moon’s south pole.

A new study published in the journal Science Advances shows that the impact that...

An international team of astronomers, including researchers at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, has spotted the most distant astronomical object ever: a galaxy.

Named HD1, the galaxy candidate is some 13.5 billion light-years away and is described Thursday in the Astrophysical Journal. In an accompanying paper published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters, scientists have begun to speculate exactly what the galaxy is.

The team proposes two ideas: HD1 may be forming stars at an astounding rate and is possibly even home to Population III stars, the universe’s very first stars — which, until now, have never been observed...