When NASA’s OSIRIS-REx arrived at near-Earth asteroid Bennu, scientists were dismayed to find a surface covered with hazardous-looking boulders. But new research suggests that those boulders are surprisingly brittle. That’s potentially good news for the spacecraft, which is charged with grabbing a piece of Bennu on October 20 and returningContinue Reading
The annual Draconid meteor shower peaks on Wednesday, Oct. 7, but don’t get your hopes up for a spectacular sky show. Even at their peak — which, this year, occurs just after nightfall on Wednesday evening — the Draconids are usually modest, generating just a few meteors per hour. TheContinue Reading
Black holes are perhaps the strangest, least-understood objects in our universe. With so much potential — being linked to everything from wormholes to new baby universes — they have sucked in physicists for decades. But as strange as these known objects are, even stranger types of black holes could beContinue Reading
A giant star died, blasting its guts out into space. But before the star detonated, some stellar thief had already stolen the giant’s skin. Now, astrophysicists think they’ve identified the culprit: another star blasting its own guts out nearby. Supernovas are fairly common in space. Most very large stars endContinue Reading
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — SpaceX delivered its 13th batch of Starlink satellites to orbit Tuesday (Oct.6), following a two-week delay due to bad weather. The two-stage Falcon 9 rocket blasted off from Pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center at 7:29 a.m. EDT (1129 GMT), hauling a full stack ofContinue Reading
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics 2020 with one half to Roger Penrose, University of Oxford, UK, “for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity” and the other half jointly to ReinhardContinue Reading
The stuff that makes up our universe is tricky to measure, to put it mildly. We know that most of the universe’s matter-energy density consists of dark energy, the mysterious unknown force that’s driving the universe’s expansion. And we know that the rest is matter, both normal and dark. AccuratelyContinue Reading
A robotic Cygnus spacecraft successfully blasted off from Virginia late Friday (Oct. 2) carrying nearly 4 tons of gear, including a new space toilet, to the International Space Station. A Northrop Grumman Antares rocket lit up the night sky alongside a nearly full moon at 9:16 p.m. EDT (0116 GMTContinue Reading
Sneak a peek at the harvest and blue moons. Get ready to gaze on the first of two full moons slated for October; the first will dazzle sky watchers this Thursday (Oct. 1) and the second will shine eerily later this month on Halloween (Oct. 31). It’s rare to haveContinue Reading
A viable nuclear fusion reactor — one that spits out more energy than it consumes — could be here as soon as 2025. That’s the takeaway of seven new studies, published Sept. 29 in the Journal of Plasma Physics. If a fusion reactor reaches that milestone, it could pave theContinue Reading