Category Astronomy/Space

When you put your hand out the window of a moving car, you feel a force pushing against you called drag. This force opposes a moving vehicle, and it’s part of the reason why your car naturally slows to a stop if you take your foot off the gas pedal. But drag doesn’t just slow down cars.

Aerospace engineers are working on using the drag force in space to develop more fuel-efficient spacecraft and missions, deorbit spacecraft without creating as much space junk, and even place probes in orbit around other planets.

Space is not a complete vacuum − at least not all of it. Earth’s atmosphere gets thinner with altitude, but it has enough air to impart a force of drag on orbiting spacecraft, even up to about 620 miles (1,000 kilometers).

As an aerospace engineering professor, I st...

Launched on March 11, NASA’s SPHEREx space observatory has spent the last six weeks undergoing checkouts, calibrations, and other activities to ensure it is working as it should. Now it’s mapping the entire sky—not just a large part of it—to chart the positions of hundreds of millions of galaxies in 3D to answer some big questions about the universe.

On May 1, the spacecraft began regular science operations, which consist of taking about 3,600 images per day for the next two years to provide new insights about the...

Astronomers have discovered a likely explanation for a fracture in a huge cosmic “bone” in the Milky Way galaxy, using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and radio telescopes.

The bone appears to have been struck by a fast-moving, rapidly spinning neutron star, or a pulsar. Neutron stars are the densest known stars and form from the collapse and explosion of massive stars. They often receive a powerful kick from these explosions, sending them away from the explosion’s location at high speeds.

Enormous structures resembling bones or snakes are found near the center of the galaxy...

The European Space Agency’s Gaia mission has spotted an unusual family of stars all strangely eager to leave home – a family we couldn’t have discovered without the star-surveying spacecraft, and one unlike all others we have spotted to date.

Stars in the Milky Way tend to form in families, with similar stars springing to life in roughly the same place at roughly the same time. These stars later head out into the wider galaxy when they’re ready to fly the nest. While smaller groups can completely dissipate, siblings from sizeable families usually move similarly and largely travel together.

We have seen many star families with Gaia...