Category Astronomy/Space

Three and a half years after giving humanity its first close-up view of Pluto, and almost 13 years after launching from Earth, the New Horizons spacecraft will explore another new frontier: a reddish hunk of rock and ice known as Ultima Thule.

The object—or, perhaps, pair of objects (it’s so far away astronomers aren’t sure) – is thought to be a pristine remnant of the early solar system, untouched for billions of years. Its nickname conveys its significance, meaning “beyond the known world.”

Ultima Thule is 4 billion miles from Earth. New Horizons will reach it as the new year arrives on Jan. 1, with a mission to collect as many images and as much data as possible while speeding past at 32,000 miles per hour...

Uranus is a lopsided oddity, the only planet to spin on its side. Scientists now think they know how it got that way: It was pushed over by a rock at least twice as big as Earth...

The Cold Atom Lab (CAL) is the first facility in orbit to produce clouds of “ultracold” atoms, which can reach a fraction of a degree above absolute zero: -459ºF (-273ºC), the absolute coldest temperature that matter can reach. Nothing in nature is known to hit the temperatures achieved in laboratories like CAL, which means the orbiting facility is regularly the coldest known spot in the universe.

NASA’s Cold Atom Laboratory on the International Space Station is regularly the coldest known spot in the universe...

Astronomers using data from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have employed a revolutionary method to detect dark matter in galaxy clusters...