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Just a few hours ago, SpaceX launched its third flight to the International Space Station tasked with carrying precious cargo as part of its current contract with NASA. Shortly after the 10:10 AM EST launch of the Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral, however, the Dragon Capsule experienced a glitch shortly after parting with its rocket. The […]
Astronomers using ESO’s Very Large Telescope have obtained what is likely the first direct observation of a forming planet still embedded in a thick disc of gas and dust. If the finding is confirmed, it could significantly boost what we already know about forming planets. An international team led by Sascha Quanz (ETH Zurich, Switzerland) […]
A ring of radiation that scientists knew nothing about fleetingly surrounded our planet last year, before being blown away by a powerful interplanetary shock, researchers say. Astronomic intuition Usually, whenever NASA launches a spacecraft, they wait weeks or even months to finely tune all its instruments. It’s a rite of passage that all shuttles (and […]
NASA has, for the first time, released a global map of ocean salinity. The first thing that popped up for me was the pulse of freshwater gushing from the Amazon, but other major features are worth noticing. An invisible seam divides the salty Arabian Sea from the fresher waters of the Bay of Bengal and […]
Astronomers have made the first accurate measurement of a supermassive black hole’s spin, providing new insights that might help scientists probe the mysteries the surround them. Supermassive black holes have an incredibly huge gravitational pull that doesn’t let anything in its surroundings escape its hungry maw, be it dust, rock or even light. Some are […]
The European Space Agency just announced the asteroid they chose for an upcoming controlled crash landing of one of their spacecraft. The objective? Well, more or less, they just want to see what happens. The Asteroid Impact and Deflection Assessment (AIDA) mission will intercept the asteroid, called Didymos, in 2022, when the asteroid gets within […]
Though hundreds of potentially life harboring exoplanets have been discovered thus far, until the James Webb Space Telescope becomes operational, sometime around 2018, scientists today lack the resources to peer into the guts of these planet and determine a realistic chance of hosting life. Even when the JWT goes live, however, it will take hundreds […]
Most of us likely own a phone that has more computing power than that available for the entire Apollo mission which landed a man on the moon, still rather curiously we choose to dedicate most of it to browsing photos of cute cats on the web. Nevertheless, there comes a time when pedestrian technology can […]
A metal poor star located in the Milky Way galaxy, “just” 190 light years away from our Sun is 14.46+-0.80 billion years old – nearly as much as the age of the Universe! All stars follow a stellar evolutionary path; by knowing some parameters about the star (such as mass, luminosity, and surface temperature), astronomers […]
According to a new study, the generally accepted theory on lunar formation may have to be reexamined. A relatively recent study has found water in the Moon’s original crust, which means that water found in those rocks didn’t come from an outside source, but was already there when the Moon was formed – something impossible, […]
Millionaire Dennis Tito, 72, is widely known as the first private citizen to fly into space in 2001. But being the entrepreneurial spirit he is, he wants to go even further – he plans to send two astronauts to Mars in 2018. We’re still awaiting for the next week conference in which he will announce […]
As the search for life on Mars intensifies, it’s good to remember that there are other places in our own solar system that are much more likely to host life. This may be a “captain obvious” moment for some, but may come as quite the surprise for others. Europa, despite its frozen surface, is thought […]
I realize we’re maybe bugging some of you with these constant asteroid/meteor pieces here on ZME Science, but for what’s it worth we found this recently released NASA video comprised of radar images during 2012 DA14’s recent flyby very interesting. The movie, which combines 73 radar-images captured over the course of eight hours on the […]
What you see in this picture is two black spots on the sun, known as sunspots, which appeared quickly over the course of Feb. 19-20, 2013 and have grown quickly over the past couple of days. Sunspots are temporary phenomena on the Sun that appear visibly as dark spots compared to surrounding regions; they are […]
NASA’s Kepler telescope is on a roll – recently, astronomers working on it discovered a new planetary system that is home to the smallest planet yet found orbiting a star similar to our sun. A similar star, a different system The planets are located in a system researchers call Kepler-37, just over 200 light years, […]
Despite some initial worry, Curiosity’s drill worked out just fine, and now, the rover has revealed historic images that confirm it has obtained the first samples from the inside of another planet. No other rover or device has drilled to another planet and collected a sample from its interior. “Seeing the powder from the drill […]
Deep inside the Milky Way lies the beautiful star breeding ground known as the Lobster nebula, located in the constellation Scorpius – some 8,000 light-years away from Earth. The nebula has been the subject of study for astronomers for many years, however just recently it has been imaged in infrared for the first time capturing […]
During a chance encounter with an unusually strong blast of solar wind at Saturn, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft detected particles being accelerated to ultra-high energies (like those at the LHC); this acceleration is similar to that which takes place around distant supernovas and provides a valuable in-situ study environment. The Cassini spacecraft is an absolutely stunning […]
NASA’s really trying to step up their social media game, and this is definitely good news. This week, NASA’s social media followers and their guests will have the unique opportunity to talk to three of the six crew members aboard the International Space Station, as well as the scientists and engineers involved in the project. […]
A new, probably significant discovery will be published in two weeks, the leader of a space-based particle physics experiment said Sunday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Why this is important Dark matter is every bit as mysterious and cool as it sounds; from what we know so […]
So, remember that Higgs boson discovery we got all excited about a while ago? You know, validated the Standard model, proved our understanding of the subatomic world not wrong, and all that? Turns out, that same data could very well be an obituary for our Universe – at least that’s what Joseph Lykken of the […]
The weekend that has just passed was a tight one for asteroid news. At the center was of course the much raved about “2012 DA14” – the closest asteroid of this significant size to flyby Earth since recorded history – which actually speared passed Earth at an altitude of 27,700km, a few thousand kilometers below the […]
Tonight a historical event is about to occur after an asteroid half the size of a football field, called “2012 DA14”, is set to make the closest flyby to Earth any asteroid of its kind has ever made, since we know of. NASA along with all the other space programs in the world positively dismiss […]
A telescope in Chile recently imaged one of the brightest spots at the core of the Milky Way, beautifully illustrating a star cluster and its neighboring dark nebula. The latter offers a stunning contrast for the billions of stars present in this patch of our galaxy. This fantastic view was made possible using the Wide Field […]
Astronomers at NASA‘s Chandra X-ray Observatory were delighted to come across one of the rarest events in the Universe, after they came across an atypical kind of supernova. To top it over, the supernova’s remnants may have given birth to the Milky Way’s youngest black hole estimated thus far. After a massive star, say ten times […]
After researchers surveyed data from the Kepler mission tasked with identifying possibly habitable planets outside our solar system they found that 6% of red dwarfs – the most common type of planets – are within this zone. This new adjustment would mean that the nearest Earth-like planet might lie just 13 light years away. Astronomers […]
NASA’s Landsat Data Continuity Mission spacecraft aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket is cleared for flight, and with the weather forecasts remaining excellent, it seems everything is set for the launch. The Landsat satellite operations began all the way back in 1972, providing a huge amount of useful satellite information. This eight generation […]
A lot of worry was spurred when a malfunction at Curiosity’s drilling mechanism jeopardized the entire mission, but now, everything seems to be working out just fine; the rover conducted its first test drill without any negative events. However, the real work is just beginning, as the first drilling-sampling operation took place. This is the […]
Our galaxy is teeming with billions of planets very much like our own, a new research suggests – many of them circling a star similar to our Sun. Earlier research suggested that if you want to find planets like our own, you must first find stars like our own; but a fresh analysis from the […]
It was a mystery that kept astronomers scratching their heads for years, but now, it finally seems to be cracked: particles from inside the solar system bounce off a “ribbon” of energy boundary and neutral atoms from that collision stream inward. Why and how this happens remained a mystery for quite a while. Basically, this strange […]
If you remember, a few weeks ago I reported on the ISON comet, discovered just last year, but which is already hailed as possibly the “comet of the century”. If the ISON comet won’t collapse during its closest approach to the sun, its trail will be so bright and massive that it will become visible […]
The Kepler mission has proven to be invaluable to science today thanks to its formidable discoveries of exoplanets in our galaxy. It’s rather remarkable how scientists can tell so much from so little, like the size, mass, orbit and sometimes even composition of a distant planet all by analyzing light. On other hand, it’s frustrating […]
Recently, Curiosity rover made its most complex maneuver since it landed on Mars after it drilled a promising rock, offering scientists with invaluable geological information otherwise inaccessible. This is the first time a robot has carried out a drilling operation on another planet, and the last important check in Curiosity’s scientific arsenal, signaling all the […]
The (still debated) asteroid that slammed into the Earth 65 million years ago and played a crucial role in wiping dinosaurs out, may have actually been a binary system- 2 asteroids engaged in an orbit around each other. Double trouble The surprising claim comes from analyzing the proportion of asteroid craters on Earth that were […]
After the successful test in which the Iranians sent a monkey into outer space and back safely, their goal of sending a man to the Moon by 2025 seems quite feasible. Ok, so some liked this, the US didn’t really like it but that’s a different story – but Iran’s space program is not really […]
That’s what NASA officials have been telling the press recently, at least. If you haven’t heard yet, a football field-sized asteroid called 2012 DA14 is expected to come buzzing past Earth later this month, making it, in NASA’s own words, a ‘record-setter’ in terms of asteroid proximity. The asteroid will pass so closely by Earth […]
The Uroburos is a mythological symbol representing a serpent or dragon eating its own tail – a symbol of cyclicality and eternal return. The Cassini spacecraft watching Saturn recently caught a glimpse of a storm that looks remarkably like the mythological creature – only it choked on its own tail. The storm came out incredibly […]
Ridges of Martian impact craters could be fossils of cracks in the Martian surface, formed by minerals deposited by flowing water, according to a new research. The findings, accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters, one of the most prestigious journals in the field, could explain a mysterious network of ridges that vein across the […]
As our search for alien planets improves and intensifies, astronomers are starting to pay more and more attention to one crucial aspect of alien planets: whether they fit into the ‘habitable zone‘ – the so-called Goldilocks area in which a planet is not too close and not too far from its star – just perfectly […]
Close, but not too close – an asteroid like that can crash on our planet every 1200 years, but there’s no reason to worry, even though it will make a flyby on February 15, passing at a distance of only 26.780 km. For comparison, the distance to the Moon varies from around 356,400 km to […]
The American (NASA) and European (ESA) space agency have teamed up to create a new spacecraft that will hold a groundbreaking telescope. The mission, Euclid, will look at billions of galaxies, create a more accurate map of the Universe, and also map out the mysterious dark matter and dark energy. Dark Matter and Dark Energy […]
A historic expedition that took over 10 years of planning and 3 years of preparation, a national effort from both researchers and students, finally concluded today. The team from Montana State University managed to drill into a lake that has been frozen for hundreds of thousands of years. After hauling equipment hundreds of miles across […]
Presumably, of course, since this news piece has only been delivered by an Iranian state-owned and controlled news outlet, and has yet to be confirmed by an independent source. Apparently, the Iranian space program successfully launched a live monkey into space, after the capsule in which the animal was housed reached an altitude of 75 miles, […]
Astronomers are baffled by a pulsar heavier than the Sun and smaller than New York which alternatively switches on and off between radio and X-ray emissions. Small and heavy Pulsars are highly magnetized, rotating neutron stars, with a radius in the order of about 10 km, made up of neutrons. It is the result of […]
Deep Space Industries (DSI), a private space ventures company, has recently announced plans of launching a fleet of asteroid-prospecting spacecraft set to touch base with near-Earth space rocks. The small sized, light weight spacecraft would analyze and sample asteroids for those rich enough in resources like fuel, water and rare minerals. The first launch is scheduled […]
The Very Large Array radio telescope network in New Mexico recently captured this amazing view of a 20,000 year old nebula that intriguing enough is shaped like a manatee – the famous and adorable sea cow native to the greater Gulf of Mexico – in its favorite position: floating on its back with its fins across […]
Researchers from Leicester University have shown that auroras (similar to Earth’s aurora borealis) occur on other bodies outside our solar system. Aurora borealis Aurora borealis is a natural light display occuring in high latitude areas (both north and south), caused by the collision of energetic charged particles with atoms in the high altitude atmosphere. Here’s […]
The cold, lifeless Vesta asteroid might be a lot more like our planet than astronomers believed – having a very active life in the early stages of the solar system evolution, a study of a Saharan meteorite shows. The planet that wasn’t Vesta might host a magmatic layer under its rocky exterior, allowing minerals to […]
Exobiologists have found what they believe to be the clearest evidence that Mars supported life – though it may not seem obvious at a first glance. The research published in Nature Geoscience shows all the needed ingredients for life in a huge crater that goes up to 5km below the planet’s surface. The McLaughlin crater, […]
The most powerful explosion in the Universe – a gamma-ray burst– might have hit Earth during the middle ages. Luckily enough for our ancestors the event had its origin thousands of light years away and its effects went by unnoticed. Last year, scientists found unusual levels of radioactive carbon-14 in cedar trees in Japan and spikes […]
