Space, features and articles | Educational Science

Feb 28, 2022

Northern Lights: What are the aurorae borealis?

The northern lights are a phenomenon that appear in the sky when charged particles coming from the sun slam into oxygen and nitrogen molecules in the atmosphere, ionizing those molecules and causing them to glow. These lights can only typically be seen at high northern latitudes, and they can vary...

Feb 28, 2022

Satellite images show fires and rubble in Mariupol after devastating Russian attack

New satellite images of Ukraine have revealed shocking scenes of death and destruction in the southern port city of Mariupol. The images, taken by the U.S. private satellite company Maxar on Saturday (March 12) morning, reveal a hellish landscape of smoldering apartment blocks; parks pockmarked by shell fire; and grocery...

Feb 28, 2022

Why did Russian cosmonauts wear Ukraine-flag colors?

Three cosmonauts boarded the International Space Station on Friday (March 18) donning bright-yellow and blue flight suits, with some likening the fashion choice to the Russian trio's support of Ukraine. Now, the Russian space agency has not only denied but ridiculed that interpretation. Sometimes yellow is just yellow, Roscosmos' press...

Jan 31, 2022

Could the moon ever be pushed from orbit, like in 'Moonfall'?

The moon has been Earth's close companion for billions of years, and while our view of its shape and size varies somewhat as it orbits our planet, it remains a constant presence in the sky. But could that change? In the 2022 movie Moonfall (Lionsgate, released on Feb. 4), a...

Jan 31, 2022

Here's what will happen when SpaceX rocket crashes into the moon

It's not often that the sudden appearance of a new impact crater on the Moon can be predicted, but it’s going to happen on March 4, when a derelict SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will crash into it. The rocket launched in 2015, carrying Nasa’s Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) probe...

Jan 31, 2022

The solar system: Facts about our cosmic neighborhood

The solar system is a collection of planets, moons, asteroids, comets, dust and gas that orbit our local star, the sun. It includes the rocky inner planets Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars; the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn; and the ice giants Uranus and Neptune. Between Mars and Jupiter is...

Dec 31, 2021

We may finally be able to test one of Stephen Hawking's most far-out ideas

We may soon be able to test one of Stephen Hawking's most controversial theories, new research suggests. In the 1970s, Hawking proposed that dark matter, the invisible substance that makes up most matter in the cosmos, may be made of black holes formed in the earliest moments of the Big...

Dec 31, 2021

James Webb Space Telescope completes tricky sunshield deployment

The James Webb Space Telescope has successfully deployed all five layers of its tennis-court-sized sunshield, a prerequisite for the telescope's science operations and the most nerve-wracking part of its risky deployment. The challenging procedure, which required careful tensioning of each of the five hair-thin layers of the elaborate sunshield structure...

Dec 31, 2021

Mystery 'moon hut' is actually an adorable rabbit-shaped rock

A mysterious moon hut spotted by China's lunar Yutu 2 rover is actually … an adorable rabbit-shaped rock. The rock has been nicknamed jade rabbit by the Yutu 2 team, which announced its rover's closer inspection of the object on Friday (Jan. 7). The nickname is apt, as the rover's...

Dec 31, 2021

NASA's Perseverance rover is clogged up with pebbles

A small pile of pebbles is clogging up the Perseverance Mars rover's operations. The rover, which is collecting rock samples for eventual return to Earth, began to struggle on Dec. 29, after extracting a core from a rock the mission team nicknamed Issole. According to a NASA blog, the problem...

Dec 31, 2021

Webb Telescope is now orbiting 1 million miles from Earth

The most powerful space telescope ever launched just fired its thrusters to reach its permanent cosmic address. With this final course adjustment complete, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is now orbiting around the sun at a distance of nearly 1 million miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth. Around 2...

Dec 31, 2021

Do we live in a simulation? Here's why we may never know.

Is everything we know and experience, up to and including reality itself, a simulation created by some unseen and unknowable entity? This idea, known as the simulation hypothesis, was first posed by University of Oxford professor Nick Bostrom in 2003. But does the simulation hypothesis offer a compelling argument, or...

Nov 30, 2023

James Webb telescope finds water in roiling disk of gas around ultra-hot star for 1st time ever

In a first-of-its-kind discovery, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has detected water in the inner region of a disk of planet-forming gas and dust surrounding an infant star. The detection is significant because the water, along with other molecules needed to form worlds like Earth, were found close to...

Nov 30, 2023

Unexpected cosmic clumping could disprove our best understanding of the universe

A survey of more than 25 million galaxies has found a strange contradiction in how astronomers measure the universe's clumpiness, and it could threaten the standard model of cosmology, which describes how the universe formed and evolved. The discrepancy, found by measuring the warping of light by the powerful gravitational...

Sep 30, 2023

'Significant and unexpected': Dying star spits out a sun's worth of mass just before going supernova

A massive star that exploded in the Pinwheel Galaxy in May appears to have unexpectedly lost approximately one sun's worth of ejected mass during the final years of its life before going supernova, new observations have shown. This discovery reveals more about the enigmatic end days of massive stars. On...