Category Astronomy/Space

Results to provide data for NASA’s upcoming Psyche mission. An asteroid impact can be enough to ruin anyone’s day, but several small factors can make the difference between an out-of-this-world story and total annihilation. In)l AIP Advances, by AIP Publishing, a researcher from the National Institute of Natural Hazards in China developed a computer simulation of asteroid collisions to better understand these factors.NASA’s Psyche mission aims to be the first spacecraft to explore an asteroid made entirely of metal. CREDIT: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU

The computer simulation initially sought to replicate model asteroid strikes performed in a laboratory...

Earth and Mars were formed from material that largely originated in the inner solar system; only a few percent of the building blocks of these two planets originated beyond Jupiter’s orbit. A group of researchers led by the University of Münster (Germany) report these findings today in the journal Science Advances...

Astronomers have produced the most comprehensive image of radio emission from the nearest actively feeding supermassive black hole to Earth.

The emission is powered by a central black hole in the galaxy Centaurus A, about 12 million light years away.

As the black hole feeds on in-falling gas, it ejects material at near light-speed, causing ‘radio bubbles’ to grow over hundreds of millions of years.

When viewed from Earth, the eruption from Centaurus A now extends eight degrees across the sky — the length of 16 full Moons laid side by side.

It was captured using the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) telescope in outback Western Australia.

The research was published today in the journal Nature Astronomy.

Lead author Dr Benjamin McKinley, from the Curtin University node o...

A levitating vehicle might someday explore the moon, asteroids, and other airless planetary surfaces. Aerospace engineers at MIT are testing a new concept for a hovering rover that levitates by harnessing the moon’s natural charge.

Because they lack an atmosphere, the moon and other airless bodies such as asteroid’s can build up an electric field through direct exposure to the sun and surrounding plasma. On the moon, this surface charge is strong enough to levitate dust more than 1 meter above the ground, much the way static electricity can cause a person’s hair to stand on end.

Engineers at NASA and elsewhe...