Category Astronomy/Space

The ancient Japanese art of paper-folding, or origami, is already inspiring the design of the next generation of space vehicles, but now there’s a new family of origami shapes that could make them even more compact and reliable.

Larry Howell at Brigham Young University and his colleagues have developed a new class of origami structures called bloom patterns that fold up flat and unfold like flower petals. These clever folding designs could also be used for other structures in space, such as telescopes and solar arrays.

Origami-based designs are perfect for spacecraft because they can be made to fol...

To see the world in a grain of sand: Investigating megaripples at Kerrlaguna on Mars

On Mars, the past is written in stone—but the present is written in sand. Last week, Perseverance explored inactive megaripples to learn more about the wind-driven processes that are reshaping the Martian landscape every day.

After wrapping up its investigation at the contact between clay a...

A new Durham University study has found that a giant impact may not be responsible for the formation of Jupiter’s remarkable “dilute” core, challenging a theory about the planet’s history.

Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system, has a mystery at its heart. Unlike what scientists once expected, its core doesn’t have a sharp boundary but instead gradually blends into the surrounding layers of mostly hydrogen (a structure known as a dilute core).

How this dilute core formed has been a key question among scientists and astronomers ever since NASA’s Juno spacecraft first revealed its existence.

A previous study suggested that a colossal collision with an early planet containing half of Jupiter’s core material could have thoroughly ...

In 2009, NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory released a captivating image: a pulsar and its surrounding nebula that is shaped like a hand. Since then, astronomers have used Chandra and other telescopes to continue to observe this object. Now, new radio data from the Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA) has been combined with Chandra’s X-ray data to provide a fresh view of this exploded star and its environment, to help understand its peculiar properties and shape.

At the center of this new image lies the pulsar B1509-58, a rapidly spinning neutron star that is only about 12 miles in diameter...