Two NASA probes that spent last year orbiting the moon have returned stunning new geological maps that could help explain how it, Earth, and other planets in our solar system formed. The probes, named Ebb and Flow, flew identical orbits just miles above the moon’s surface to measure its gravity field. Slight disruptions in their paths—caused by the push and […]
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Imagine a pivotal scene from your favorite sci-fi alien invasion movie where their 50-foot wide laser beams destroy our buildings like sneezing on a pile of flour. What could we do? We’re merely meat muppets with pitiful silicon based technology. How could we ever hope to detect these aliens with their stealth spacecraft and 3rd stage guild navigators? If we’re […]
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Thanks to the Hubble space telescope, it is nearly impossible to unsee the huge glimmering region on the surface of Uranus. The cause of this blatant smear on Uranus is caused by powerful bursts of solar wind. Streams of charged particles caught in powerful magnetic fields forced into the upper atmosphere of Uranus, where their interactions with gas particles, such […]
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Stephen Hawking: ‘There are no black holes‘ – Renowned physicist Stephen Hawking has declared that black holes do not exist – at least not in the way we normally think about them. In a new paper, he tackles a scientific paradox regarding a black hole’s event horizon. This is the threshold past which nothing can escape it’s gravitational pull. Under […]
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People always wonder how the moon was made. The birth of the planets 4.5 billion years ago was extremely violent. They grew to full size by absorbing rival planet embryos in a series of titanic collisions—one of which probably gave Earth its moon (below). The moon’s large size, low density, and other features suggest that it emerged from an explosion […]
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Astronomers have spotted the most enormous black holes ever detected, inspiring new theories about how such pockets of extreme gravity form. Together, the two objects, which are roughly 300 million light-years away, have more mass than 30 billion suns, University of California at Berkeley astrophysicist Chung-Pei Ma tells the Associated Press. “They are monstrous,” she says. The smaller of the […]
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Scientists typically believe that dark matter behaves in a simple way: if one clump encounters another, the two interact solely through gravity. However, researchers have published findings which suggest that there’s more involved. They’ve noticed dark matter (the blue lines in the photo above) lagging behind a galaxy due to friction, hinting that there are factors beyond gravity at work. […]
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Space scientists are trying to figure out how the mystery Mars rock shaped like a jelly doughnut suddenly appeared on Mars’s surface, in full view of the rover Opportunity’s camera. NASA scientists noticed the mystery Mars rock when reviewing images taken by Opportunity as it explored Endeavor Crater. One shot depicted an empty patch of ruddy ground, but the next […]
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In the sci-fi movie Armageddon, astronauts intercept a killer asteroid heading for Earth, saving mankind. NASA is taking the first step to develop the technology to do just that, by planning a mission to slightly alter an asteroid’s orbit. The mission will also serve as an initial test of a solar-electric propulsion system and other technologies essential for a manned […]
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Scientists from the University of Delaware’s Bartol Research Institute in the Department of Physics and Astronomy have discovered very-high-energy gamma rays in the Cigar Galaxy (M82), a bright galaxy filled with exploding stars 12 million light years from Earth. The gamma rays observed by the team have energies more than a trillion times higher than the energy of visible light […]
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