Category Astronomy/Space

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...

Improved deformable mirrors could help scientists detect new sources of gravitational waves from deep in space. Researchers have developed a new type of deformable mirror that could increase the sensitivity of ground-based gravitational wave detectors such as the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO)...

Astronomers have captured new, detailed maps of three nearby interstellar gas clouds containing regions of ongoing high-mass star formation. The results of this survey, called the Star Formation Project, will help improve our understanding of the star formation process.

We know that stars such as the Sun are born from interstellar gas clouds. These interstellar gas clouds are difficult to observe in visible light, but emit strong radio wavelength, which can be observed by the Nobeyama 45-m Radio Telescope in Japan...