Tag Archives: astronomy

Rare, fleeting radio flashes in the sky have bewildered astronomers for more than a decade. These “fast radio bursts,” blips that flare and then disappear in a couple seconds or less, flit in and out of existence so quickly that astronomers struggle to study them, let alone pinpoint their cosmic …

A rad moon’s on the rise. Early on October 14, our lunar satellite will briefly hover before the sun, obscuring the dawn and immersing millions of people in a strange morning gloom. But this annular eclipse will not be total: Since the moon’s traveling at the more distant part of …

NASA’s Psyche spacecraft blasted off this morning at 10:20 am Eastern time and is now en route to its namesake metal-rich asteroid. The long-delayed mission will examine the asteroid with a suite of scientific instruments and determine whether the hunk of rock was the core of a baby planet that …

At long last, NASA’s curation scientists have revealed what OSIRIS-REx ferried back from an asteroid 100 million miles away. The seven-year mission scooped up a rock sample from Bennu in 2020, then returned it to Earth in September, parachuting it down into the Utah desert. Scientists painstakingly cleaned and shipped …

Amazon is set to launch two satellite prototypes for its Project Kuiper network, which will eventually number more than 3,200 orbiters. Project Kuiper could become a rival to SpaceX’s Starlink constellation, which is now nearly 4,800 strong. Amazon’s launch is planned for 2 pm Eastern time today, with a backup …

Consider the possibility of alien plants. After all, plenty of exoplanets likely have conditions friendly to the development of plants, even if evolution there never makes it as far as complex organisms and animals. But if moss, algae, and lichen envelop lush exoplanets in the faraway realms of the Milky …

The blazing surface of the sun froths with an extremely hot electrically charged gas called plasma. The temperature at the edge of this cosmic furnace runs at about 5,500 degrees Celsius, but here’s the real puzzle: Somehow the sun’s atmosphere, which surrounds that surface like a halo, is 150 times …

An influential group of researchers is making the case for new ways to search the skies for signs of alien societies. They argue that current methods could be biased by human-centered thinking, and that it’s time to take advantage of data-driven, machine learning techniques. The team of 22 scientists released …

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Of the 100 trillion neutrinos that pass through you every second, most come from the sun or Earth’s atmosphere. But a smattering of the particles—those moving much faster than the rest—traveled here from powerful sources farther away. For decades, astrophysicists …