Imagine going on a weeklong business trip and not coming home until the following year. That may be the situation for U.S. astronauts Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore, whose eight-day mission to the International Space Station has already stretched to more than two months and is likely to go even longer. The pair launched to … Read more
To leave a lasting trail, meteors need to aim low. A new survey of shooting stars shows that meteors that blaze through 90 kilometers up in the sky leave a persistent afterglow, unlike those that burn up at greater heights. Meteors are normally blink-and-you’ll-miss-it events. A particle of space dust leaves a fiery trail of … Read more
For millennia, humans have seen inexplicable things in the sky. Some have been beautiful, some have been terrifying, and some — like auroras and solar eclipses before they were understood scientifically — have been both. Today’s aircraft, balloons, drones, satellites and more only increase the chances of spotting something confounding overhead. In the United States, … Read more
The biggest clash in cosmology might be inching closer to resolution, thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope. Scientists disagree over the universe’s expansion rate, known as the Hubble constant. There are two main methods for measuring it — one based on exploding stars called supernovas and the other on the universe’s oldest light, the … Read more
A lucky alignment of two sun-studying spacecraft may have finally solved a decades-old solar mystery. Data from NASA’s Parker Solar Probe and the European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter suggest that plasma waves known as Alfvén waves inject energy into the solar wind as it leaves the sun’s outer atmosphere, potentially explaining why the solar wind … Read more
Extreme Climate Survey Scientific news is collecting readers’ questions about how to navigate our planet’s changing climate. What do you want to know about extreme heat and how it can lead to extreme weather events? Most black holes that astronomers have discovered fall into one of two categories. They are either stellar-mass black holes, up … Read more
Extreme Climate Survey Scientific news is collecting readers’ questions about how to navigate our planet’s changing climate. What do you want to know about extreme heat and how it can lead to extreme weather events? The Great Red Spot is the largest vortex in our solar system (SN: 12/12/17). Located in Jupiter’s southern hemisphere, wind … Read more
Extreme Climate Survey Scientific news is collecting readers’ questions about how to navigate our planet’s changing climate. What do you want to know about extreme heat and how it can lead to extreme weather events? This isn’t the first sign of organics on Mars – the Curiosity rover detected organic molecules in a region called … Read more
Extreme Climate Survey Scientific news is collecting readers’ questions about how to navigate our planet’s changing climate. What do you want to know about extreme heat and how it can lead to extreme weather events? In the 1960s and 1970s, the Apollo missions that landed on the Moon carried two types of seismometers: one to … Read more
Extreme Climate Survey Scientific news is collecting readers’ questions about how to navigate our planet’s changing climate. What do you want to know about extreme heat and how it can lead to extreme weather events? “It’s great to have as many plans as possible, especially when it comes to saving our biodiversity and life on … Read more