Category Astronomy/Space

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...

A powerful radio-wave laser, called a ‘megamaser’, has been observed by the MeerKAT telescope in South Africa. The record-breaking find is the most distant megamaser of its kind ever detected, at about five billion light years from Earth.

The light from the megamaser has travelled 58 thousand billion billion (58 followed by 21 z...

Over the last two decades, scientists have discovered unusual ridge networks on Mars using images from spacecraft orbiting the Red Planet. How and why the ridges formed and what clues they may provide about the history of Mars has remained unknown.

A team of scientists, led by Aditya Khuller of Arizona State University’s School of Earth and Space Exploration and Laura Kerber of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, set out to learn more about these ridges by mapping a large area of Mars with th...