Category Astronomy/Space

Researchers probed Martian meteorites to reconstruct Mars’ chaotic history. Their findings suggest that Mars might not have had a global magma ocean.

In Jessica Barnes’ palm is an ancient, coin-sized mosaic of glass, minerals and rocks as thick as a strand of wool fiber. It is a slice of Martian meteorite, known as Northwest Africa 7034 or Black Beauty, that was formed when a huge impact cemented together various pieces of Martian crust.

Barnes is an assistant professor of planetary sciences in the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Labo...

Astronomers obtained the first resolved image of disturbed gaseous clouds in a galaxy 11 billion light-years away by using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). The team found that the disruption is caused by young powerful jets ejected from a supermassive black hole residing at the center of the host galaxy. This result will cast light on the mystery of the evolutionary process of galaxies in the early Universe.

It is commonly k...

NASA’s Perseverance rover is on track to launch this summer, and when it does, it will carry the names of nearly 11 million people to Mars.

Earlier this month, as communities around the country locked themselves down in an effort to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus, a team at Kennedy Space Center in Florida started the process of packing the rover for launch. They lowered and locked the rover’s mast, stowed away its robotic arm, and retracted its wheels. But first, they fixed the rover up with the ultimate vanity license plate.

Last year, NASA asked people around the world to submit their names to its “Send Your Name to Mars” program, and 10,932,295 people responded...

Almost 35 years ago, scientists made the then-radical proposal that colossal hydrogen bombs called novae go through a very long-term life cycle after erupting, fading to obscurity for hundreds of thousands of years and then building back up to become full-fledged novae once more. A new study is the first to fully model the work and incorporate all of the feedback factors now known to control these systems, backing up the original prediction while bringing new details to light. Published this week in the journal Nature Astronomy, the study confirms that the novae we observe flashing throughout the universe represent just a few percent of these cataclysmic variables, as they are known, with the rest “hiding” in hibernation.

“We’ve now quantified the suggest...