Category Astronomy/Space

Asteroids hold many clues about the formation and evolution of planets and their satellites. Understanding their history can, therefore, reveal much about our solar system. While observations made from a distance using electromagnetic waves and telescopes are useful, analyzing samples retrieved from asteroids can yield much more detail about their characteristics and how they may have formed. An endeavor in this direction was the Hayabusa mission, which, in 2010, returned to Earth after 7 years with samples from the asteroid Itokawa.

The successor to this mission, called Hayabusa2, was completed near the end of 2020, bringing back material from Asteroid 162173 “Ryugu,” along with a collection of images and data gathered remotely from close proximity...

Researchers may have solved Professor Stephen Hawking’s famous black hole paradox—a mystery that has puzzled scientists for almost half a century.

According to two new studies, something called “quantum hair” is the answer to the problem.

In the first paper, published in the journal Physical Review Letters, researchers demonstrated that black holes are more complex than originally thought and have gravitational fields that hold information about how they were formed.

The researchers showed that matter collapsing into a black hole leaves a mark in its gravitational field—an imprint referred to as a “quantum hair.”

In a follow-up paper, published in a separate journal, Physics Letters B, Professor Xavier Calmet from the University of Sussex’s Sch...

In Mars’ northern hemisphere, springtime has arrived, and observations from the HiRISE (High Resolution Imaging Experiment) onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has captured partially defrosted dunes on the western slope of dunes inside Kaiser Crater.

In the winter, the dark sand dunes are covered in a blanket of white seasonal ice, which you can see in the image below. But this image actually shows the beginning of Martian springtime, where the sunny side of the dunes had just begun to thaw. The lead image shows even further thawing, with the darker dunes showing through.

“Bright patches of frost (white in enhanced color) are clearly visible and are made up of water and carbon dioxide ices,” w...