Space, features and articles | Educational Science

Aug 31, 2020

There's no speed limit in a superfluid universe. Now we know why.

In the cold, dense medium of a helium-3 superfluid, scientists recently made an unexpected discovery. A foreign object travelling through the medium could exceed a critical speed limit without breaking the fragile superfluid itself. As this contradicts our understanding of superfluidity, it presented quite a puzzle - but now, by...

Aug 31, 2020

Here's everything we know about the secretive spy satellite launching tonight

Update: The launch of the U.S. spy satellite was aborted just 7 seconds before liftoff. The U.S. government is putting something big and secret in orbit tonight (Sept 30). Such classified launches aren't all that rare. The military and various intelligence agencies routinely put satellites and other cargo into space...

Jul 31, 2020

The first SpaceX astronauts are back on Earth

Update 2:50 pm EDT: Everything went as planned, with SpaceX and NASA reporting a successful splashdown. The astronauts radioed in from inside the capsule that they were feeling good. A recovery team has begun the process of extracting the crew from the capsule, while the astronauts run some final checks....

Jul 31, 2020

Entire cities could fit inside the moon's monstrous lava tubes

Mars is pockmarked with absolutely massive lava tubes, with ceilings as high as the Empire State Building, new research shows. And the moon hosts even more gargantuan tubes, with heights that dwarf Dubai's Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest building, and skylights as big as football fields. These yawning, subterranean caverns,...

Jul 31, 2020

How Earth's gravity changed record-breaking asteroid's path forever

The record-breaking asteroid 2020 QG won't soon forget its run-in with Earth. Early Sunday morning (Aug. 16), the car-sized 2020 QG zoomed just 1,830 miles (2,950 kilometers) above the Indian Ocean, making the closest known flyby by an asteroid that didn't end up slamming into our planet. Though 2020 QG...

Jul 31, 2020

How long is a galactic year?

Humans are used to keeping time by measuring Earth's movement relative to the sun. But while Earth's trips around its star are noteworthy to life on our pale blue dot, that journey is pretty insignificant when compared with the epic voyage that carries the sun — and our entire solar...

Jul 31, 2020

This week's full moon happens only once every 3 years

This week, for the first time in three years, the September full moon is in a unique situation: it's happening so early in the month — a timing that gives it an entirely different name, the corn moon, instead of the harvest moon — that it sets the stage for...

Jun 30, 2020

How to watch the 'Independence Day' lunar eclipse

Bummed about Fourth of July fireworks being canceled in your area? Don't be: There will be an even bigger celestial treat for skygazers this weekend; a full moon and a partial penumbral eclipse will be visible this Saturday and Sunday (July 4-5). The timing isn't a coincidence — lunar eclipses...

Jun 30, 2020

Can energy be sucked out of a black hole?

A rotating black hole is such an extreme force of nature that it drags surrounding time and space around with it. So it is only natural to ask whether black holes could be used as some sort of energy source. In 1969, mathematical physicist Roger Penrose proposed a method to...

Jun 30, 2020

Rocket Lab Electron launch fails to reach orbit, 7 satellites lost

A Rocket Lab Electron booster failed to reach orbit while attempting to launch seven small satellites for three different customers on Saturday (July 4). The two-stage Electron booster rose off the pad at Rocket Lab's New Zealand launch site at 5:19 p.m. EST (0919 GMT; 9:19 p.m. local New Zealand...

Jun 30, 2020

Are UFOs a threat? We need to investigate, says former head of secret US program

There's no denying that America has an enduring fascination with unidentified flying objects, or UFOs. However, UFO interest extends far beyond the U.S. — sightings are reported worldwide, and multiple observations in far-flung locations describe aerial objects that are uncannily similar to each other, Luis Elizondo, former head of a...

Jun 30, 2020

Origin of 'Mirach's Ghost' perplexes black hole scientists

About 10 million light-years from Earth, a blurry galaxy named Mirach's Ghost may help unravel a dark mystery: where the largest black holes in the universe came from. But this ghostly galaxy has also deepened the mystery surrounding these objects' births. A black hole is a singularity, a region in...

Jun 30, 2020

28 'cocooned' black holes found hiding in plain sight

More than two dozen missing cocooned black holes have been rediscovered, after researchers took a new look at X-ray maps of the sky. All of these singularities had been misclassified as distant galaxies or other types of black holes. All 28 of the objects are supermassive black holes, billions of...

Jun 30, 2020

NASA: Mars rover Perseverance in 'safe mode' after launch, but should recover

NASA is celebrating the launch of its most advanced Mars rover ever today (July 30), even as engineers tackle a glitch that left the spacecraft in a protective safe mode shortly after liftoff. The Mars 2020 Perseverance rover launched toward the Red Planet at 7:50 a.m. EDT (1150 GMT), riding...

May 31, 2020

Half the matter in the universe was missing. Scientists just found it hiding in the cosmos.

In the late 1990s, cosmologists made a prediction about how much ordinary matter there should be in the universe. About 5%, they estimated, should be regular stuff with the rest a mixture of dark matter and dark energy. But when cosmologists counted up everything they could see or measure at...