The Mysterious ‘Magic Island’ on One of Saturn’s Moons
The Milky Way and its closest neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy, are on course for “ a head-on collision,” says astronomer Roeland van der Marel of the Space Telescope Science Institute. But no need for precautions because the crash won’t happen for another 4 billion years. Researchers have long known that Andromeda, currently some 2.5 million light-years away, is moving toward […]
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All the gold on Earth was forged in the collisions of massively dense stars billions of years ago. Astronomers have come to this conclusion after observing and analyzing the afterglow of a crash between two neutron stars in a galaxy 3.9 billion light-years away that yielded a hoard of gold likely equal to the mass of 20 Earths. “At today’s […]
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Scientists have discovered a new branch of the Taurids meteor stream that could prove to be a major disaster for Earth, with asteroids up to 1,000 feet wide flying past us every few years. The Taurids meteor shower peaks every October and November, producing a relatively small display of shooting stars as Earth passes through its stream. Meteor showers are […]
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Giant chunks of manmade space junk regularly fall to Earth. It has been reported that only one person has been hit by falling debris and she was not hurt. According to a Harvard University astronomer rocket parts and satellites that weigh two tons, or more are falling uncontrollably to the earth about once a month. If you go back a […]
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Mystery crater: A 40-foot crater has appeared in the ground near Managua airport. Nicaraguan authorities said the hole was caused by a meteorite that broke off from the passing Pitbull, or 2014 RC, asteroid. But NASA officials said that was unlikely, because such a strike would have produced an enormous fireball streaking across the sky, yet nobody reported seeing anything […]
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Supermassive black holes that have escaped their host galaxies may be wandering the universe alone. Intriguing new observations i by NASA’s Chandra X-ray telescope have | revealed what appears to be a supermassive | black hole being “kicked out of a galaxy at enormous speed,” Francesca Civano of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics tells Space.com. Astronomers observed two distinct light […]
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Mysterious radio signals from space have been known to repeat, but for the first time, researchers have noticed a pattern in a series of bursts coming from a single source half a billion light-years from Earth. Fast radio bursts, or FRBs, are millisecond-long bursts of radio waves in space. Individual radio bursts emit once and don’t repeat. But repeating fast […]
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Stars are not born alone. Rather, they emerge from clouds of gas and dust in groups of up to 10,000, then slowly scatter through space. For the first time, astronomers have identified a star that came from the same solar nursery as our sun, some 4.5 billion years ago. This stellar relative—located 110 light-years away in the constellation Hercules—is hotter […]
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