Space, features and articles | Educational Science

Mar 31, 2019

Israel's Beresheet Spacecraft Crashes Into Moon During Landing Attempt

The robotic Beresheet spacecraft, built by SpaceIL and Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), aimed to become the first Israeli craft, and the first privately funded mission, ever to land softly on the moon. But the little robot couldn't quite make it, crashing into the gray dirt around 3:25 p.m. EDT (1925...

Mar 31, 2019

There's a Tiny, Bright Magnetar Photobombing Our Galaxy's Supermassive Black Hole

There's a bright magnetar photobombing the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, frustrating astronomers' efforts to study the black hole — called Sagittarius A* — using X-ray telescopes. SagA* is the nearest known supermassive black hole to Earth. And while it's far smaller, quieter and dimmer...

Mar 31, 2019

Life May Have Evolved Before Earth Finished Forming

Life may have arisen in our solar system before Earth even finished forming. Planetesimals, the rocky building blocks of planets, likely had all the ingredients necessary for life as we know it way back at the dawn of the solar system, said Lindy Elkins-Tanton, a planetary scientist at Arizona State...

Mar 31, 2019

The Most Distant Object Ever Explored Is Lumpy. And Astronomers Don't Know Why.

Ultima Thule is lumpy, and scientists aren't sure why. Just after midnight on Jan. 1, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft zoomed past Ultima Thule, a small, frigid object that lies about 1 billion miles (1.6 billion kilometers) beyond the orbit of Pluto. The photos New Horizons captured during that epic encounter...

Feb 28, 2019

A 30-Million-Page Archive of Human History Was Just Launched into Space

Last week, a 30-million-page archive of human history and civilization launched aboard a spacecraft headed for the moon. The so-called Lunar Library is a small nanotech device that resembles a DVD, and it's intended as a backup plan so that everything we've ever learned as humans doesn't get lost in...

Feb 28, 2019

SpaceX Crew Dragon Splashes Down in Atlantic to Cap Historic Test Flight

The Crew Dragon capsule splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean off the Florida coast today (March 8) at 8:45 a.m. EST (1345 GMT), wrapping up a historic mission to the International Space Station (ISS). There were no astronauts aboard this flight, only the sensor-packed dummy Ripley named after a character...

Feb 28, 2019

Sneaky Meteor Evades Earthling Detection, Explodes with Force of 10 Atomic Bombs

On Dec. 18, 2018, a school bus-size meteor exploded over Earth with an impact energy of roughly 10 atomic bombs. According to NASA, the blast was the second-largest meteor impact since the organization began tracking them 30 years ago, bested only by the infamous fireball that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia,...

Feb 28, 2019

Astronomers Find Fossils of Early Universe Stuffed in Milky Way's Bulge

Astronomers peered into the dusky bulge of the Milky Way and found some of the oldest known stars in the universe. In a study to be published in the April 2019 issue of the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, researchers analyzed a cluster of old, dim stars...

Feb 28, 2019

Distant, Cold Space Rock Had 'Frankenstein' Beginnings

THE WOODLANDS, Texas — Less than three months after the New Horizons spacecraft zoomed past a distant, cold space rock, scientists are beginning to piece together the story of how that object, nicknamed Ultima Thule, came to be. In a series of scientific presentations held March 18 at the 50th...

Jan 31, 2019

Astrophysicists Find New Clue in Search for Universe's Missing Matter

Astronomers think they've found a new clue in their continuing quest to solve one of the most substantial mysteries of the cosmos: where about a third of the universe's matter is hiding. That missing matter isn't dark matter (a whole different head-scratcher), it's perfectly normal, run-of-the-mill matter that scientists simply...

Jan 31, 2019

Weird 'Snowman-Pancake' Asteroid Gets Its Close-Up. And It Really Is an Oddball.

The best-ever photos of Ultima Thule have made it down to Earth, and they heighten the intrigue about the frigid and faraway world. On New Year's Day, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft zoomed past the 21-mile-long (34 kilometers) Ultima Thule, setting a record for the most distant planetary encounter in history....

Jan 31, 2019

An Exploding Asteroid Blasted Across Mars' Surface in the Last 10 Years

Sometime in the last decade, something heavy slammed into the Martian atmosphere and shattered into a hard rain of superheated material. Those pieces fell to the Red Planet's surface, dotting the Martian dirt with a pattern of pockmarks. The impact craters, astronomer Phil Plait wrote on his Bad Astronomy blog,...

Dec 31, 2018

The Hunt Is On for Moons Around Ultima Thule

The most distant celestial object ever explored may well have moons, and astronomers are trying hard to find them. In the wee hours of Jan. 1, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft zoomed past the small, frigid object Ultima Thule, which lies more than 4 billion miles (6.4 billion kilometers) from Earth....

Dec 31, 2018

Ultrabright Quasar Lit Up the Early Universe

Astronomers have just discovered a galaxy with a supermassive black hole at its core, and it's located over 12.8 billion light-years away from Earth, just a billion years shy of the Big Bang. Known as a quasar, this object is the brightest of its kind ever seen in the distant...

Dec 31, 2018

This Exploding 'Cow' May Be the First Black Hole Birth Ever Observed

On June 16, 2018, a stupendously bright explosion tore across the cosmos and lingered in the sky above Earth for several weeks. The mysterious blast traveled 200 million light-years from the gut of the Hercules constellation, shone with the light of nearly 100 supernovas and captured the attention of the...