Category Astronomy/Space

The miniaturized CubeSat payload called both CuPID and WASP returned data about a physical phenomenon called charge exchange. Credit: NASA

The camera, which incorporated a never-before-flown focusing technology when it debuted in late 2012, is a gift that keeps giving. NASA recently selected a miniaturized version of the original X-ray camera to fly as a CubeSat mission to study Earth’s magnetic cusps – regions in the magnetic cocoon around our planet near the poles where the magnetic field lines dip down toward the ground...

This oblique image of Basho shows the distinctive dark halo that encircles the crater. The halo is composed of so-called Low Reflectance Material (LRM), which was excavated from depth when the crater was formed. Basho is also renowned for its bright ray craters, which render the crater easily visible even from very far away. Credit: Courtesy NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington

Scientists have long been puzzled about what makes Mercury’s surface so dark. The innermost planet reflects much less sunlight than the Moon, a body on which surface darkness is controlled by the abundance of iron-rich minerals. These are known to be rare at Mercury’s surface, so what is the “darkening agent” there?

About a year ago, scientists proposed that Mer...

This flexible, stretchable and tunable “meta-skin” can trap radar waves and cloak objects from detection. Credit: Liang Dong/Iowa State University

By stretching the flexible meta-skin, the device can be tuned to reduce the reflection of a wide range of radar frequencies. “It is believed that the present meta-skin technology will find many applications in electromagnetic frequency tuning, shielding and scattering suppression,” the engineers wrote in their paper.

Dong has a background in fabricating micro and nanoscale devices and working with liquids and polymers; Song has expertise in looking for new applications of electromagnetic waves...

Artist’s illustration of a gamma-ray burst. Energy from the explosion is beamed into two narrow, oppositely directed jets. Credit: NASA/Swift/Mary Pat Hrybyk-Keith and John Jones

Sometimes when a star collapses into a supernova, it releases gamma-ray bursts GRBs which last just a few seconds, but during that time they can release as much energy as the Sun will produce in its entire lifetime. They are so intense that, if pointed at the Earth from even the most distant edge of our galaxy, they could easily cause a mass extinction. It’s thought that a gamma-ray burst may have caused the Ordovician extinction around 440 million years ago, which wiped out 85% of all species at the time.

Clearly, the farther away a planet is from gamma-ray bursts, the better its chances of harboring advanced for...