Aerospace

Long ago on Mars, water carved deep riverbeds into the planet’s surface—but we still don’t know what kind of weather fed them. Scientists aren’t sure, because their understanding of the Martian climate billions of years ago remains incomplete. A new study by University of Chicago scientists catalogued these rivers to conclude that significant river runoff…

A team of scientists has proposed a powerful new test for inflation, the theory that the universe dramatically expanded in size in a fleeting fraction of a second right after the Big Bang. Their goal is to give insight into a long-standing question: what was the universe like before the Big Bang? Although cosmic inflation…

Giant planets like Uranus and Neptune may contain much less free hydrogen than previously assumed. Researchers from the German Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) drove shock waves through two different types of plastic to reach the same temperatures and pressures present inside such planets, and observed the behavior using ultra-strong X-ray laser pulses. Unexpectedly, one of these…

A Southwest Research Institute-led team has discovered that the surface geology on asteroid Bennu is older than expected. Early observations of the near-Earth asteroid (NEA) by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission indicate a surface that is between 100 million and 1 billion years old. “We expected small, kilometer-sized NEAs to have young, frequently refreshed surfaces,” said SwRI’s…

A research team from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) are trying to mimic the extreme conditions on exoplanets called “hot Jupiters” in the lab. Using a high-temperature oven, the researchers were able to heat a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide to more than 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, similar to the temperature of molten lava. Hot…

A fast-moving star may have been ejected from the Milky Way’s stellar disk by a cluster of young stars, according to researchers from the University of Michigan who say the star did not originate from the middle of the galaxy, as previously believed by astronomers. “This discovery dramatically changes our view on the origin of…

Just as dust gathers in corners and along bookshelves in our homes, dust piles up in space too. But when the dust settles in the solar system, it’s often in rings. Several dust rings circle the Sun. The rings trace the orbits of planets, whose gravity tugs dust into place around the Sun, as it…

Astronomers have discovered a binary star system with the closest high-mass young stellar objects ever measured, providing a valuable “laboratory” to test theories on high mass binary star formation. An international team led by the University of Leeds has determined the distance between the massive young star PDS 27 and its orbiting stellar companion to…

Returning samples from the surface of Mars has been a high-priority goal of the international Mars exploration community for many years. Although randomly collected samples would be potentially interesting, they would not be sufficient to answer the big questions that have motivated Mars exploration for decades. A new paper published in Meteoritics & Planetary Science…

A popular theme in the movies is that of an incoming asteroid that could extinguish life on the planet, and our heroes are launched into space to blow it up. But incoming asteroids may be harder to break than scientists previously thought, finds a Johns Hopkins study that used a new understanding of rock fracture…

A team of astronomers led by the University of California Observatories (UCO) have studied in great detail a galaxy so faint and in such pristine condition it has acted as a time capsule, sealed shortly after the dawn of our universe only to be opened by the newest technology at W. M. Keck Observatory. Using…

A NASA telescope that will give humans the largest, deepest, clearest picture of the universe since the Hubble Space Telescope could find as many as 1,400 new planets outside Earth’s solar system, new research suggests. The new telescope paves the way for a more accurate, more focused search for extraterrestrial life, according to researchers. The…

When a stream of charged particles known as the solar wind careens onto the Moon’s surface at 450 kilometers per second (or nearly 1 million miles per hour), they enrich the Moon’s surface in ingredients that could make water, NASA scientists have found. Using a computer program, scientists simulated the chemistry that unfolds when the…

An international team of scientists led by a researcher from Trinity College Dublin and University of Helsinki announced a major discovery on the very nature of solar storms in the journal Nature Astronomy. The team showed that solar storms can accelerate particles simultaneously in several locations by combining data from the Low Frequency Array, LOFAR,…

Queen Mary University of London has led a study which describes the first direct measurement of how energy is transferred from the chaotic electromagnetic fields in space to the particles that make up the solar wind, leading to the heating of interplanetary space. The study, published in Nature Communications and carried out with University of…

A study published last year in the journal Science suggested liquid water is present beneath the south polar ice cap of Mars. Now, a new study in the AGU journal Geophysical Research Letters argues there needs to be an underground source of heat for liquid water to exist underneath the polar ice cap. The new research does…

The heaviest vehicle to successfully land on Mars is the Curiosity Rover at 1 metric ton, about 2,200 pounds. Sending more ambitious robotic missions to the surface of Mars, and eventually humans, will require landed payload masses in the 5- to 20-ton range. To do that, we need to figure out how to land more…

The results are rolling in from Caltech’s newest state-of-the-art sky-surveying camera, which began operations at the Palomar Observatory in March 2018. Called the Zwicky Transient Facility, or ZTF, the new instrument has so far discovered 50 small near-Earth asteroids and more than 1,100 supernovae, and it has observed more than 1 billion stars in the…

Astronomers have found fresh evidence for significant planetary diversity within a single exoplanet system, suggesting that giant high-speed collisions are partly responsible for planetary evolution. An international team of scientists led by Italy’s National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) and involving physicists from the University of Bristol spent three years observing the exoplanetary system Kepler-107 via…

Astronomers using ALMA have detected various complex organic molecules around the young star V883 Ori. A sudden outburst from this star is releasing molecules from the icy compounds in the planet forming disk. The chemical composition of the disk is similar to that of comets in the modern Solar System. Sensitive ALMA observations enable astronomers…

Scientists from The Australian National University (ANU) have used new space technology to predict droughts and increased bushfire risk up to five months in advance. ANU researcher Siyuan Tian said the team knew they needed to move into space to get closer to understanding the complex nature of drought. They used data from multiple satellites…

The question of how quickly the universe is expanding has been bugging astronomers for almost a century. Different studies keep coming up with different answers — which has some researchers wondering if they’ve overlooked a key mechanism in the machinery that drives the cosmos. Now, by pioneering a new way to measure how quickly the…