Space & Astronomy News

Metallicity distribution of the first supernovae at 10 million years after the explosion. The supernova ejecta (orange region) has expanded to a radius of 1 kpc and enriched the surrounding gas to metallicities of 10-4 to 10-2 solar metallicity. The background yellow stripes are the cosmic structure of dark matter. …

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain Spring has officially arrived in the Northern Hemisphere, while the Southern Hemisphere is embracing autumn. The start of astronomical spring, known as the vernal equinox, occurred yesterday, March 19, 2024, at 11:06 p.m. EDT. During equinoxes, which happen twice a year, the Earth’s axis is not …

Corinto Crater. Credit: NASA There are plenty of craters on Mars, especially when compared to Earth. That is primarily thanks to the lack of weathering forces and strong plate tectonics that disrupt the formations of such impacts on our home planet. However, not all impact craters on Mars are directly …

A digital rendering of Blue Origin’s free-flying station named Orbital Reef, which continues to be developed as part of a Space Act Agreement with NASA. Credit: Blue Origin A NASA-funded commercial space station, Blue Origin’s Orbital Reef, recently completed testing milestones for its critical life support system as part of …

Credit: NASA Astronauts will test drive NASA’s Orion spacecraft for the first time during the agency’s Artemis II test flight next year. While many of the spacecraft’s maneuvers like big propulsive burns are automated, a key test called the proximity operations demonstration will evaluate the manual handling qualities of Orion. …

The Compact Space Plasma Analyzer will improve space weather prediction. Credit: Los Alamos National Laboratory Peaceful though it may seem from Earth, space is beset by “weather” that can prove perilous for the sensitive—and expensive—technology aboard the spacecraft and satellites increasingly populating the realms outside our atmosphere. To meet that …

Euclid is designed to look far and wide to answer some of the most fundamental questions about our universe: What are dark matter and dark energy? What role did they play in formation of the cosmic web? The mission will catalogue billions of distant galaxies by scanning across the sky …

Swift, illustrated here, is a collaboration between NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, Penn State in University Park, the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, and Northrop Grumman Innovation Systems in Dulles, Virginia. Other partners include the University of Leicester and Mullard Space Science Laboratory in the …

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain The total solar eclipse isn’t the only reason to keep your eyes to the sky this year. For the first time in 80 years, a star system 3,000 light years away will be visible to the naked eye thanks to a once-in-a-lifetime nova outburst. NASA announced …

Credit: NASA, ESA, and D. Coe (NASA JPL/Caltech and STScI) Dark matter is one of science’s greatest mysteries. It doesn’t absorb, reflect or emit light, so we can’t see it. But its presence is implied by the gravitational effects it appears to have on galaxies. Although dark matter makes up …