Tragic and bestowed with a sense of ambition, a German aerospace startup’s endeavor to deliver heavenly memorials and perform unique agricultural experiments in space ended in the Pacific Ocean. Aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, the Exploration Company launched a Nyx capsule containing human remains and cannabis seeds. The female capsule’s operational orbit was reached ...
The extraordinary features of a rapidly moving celestial object are scintillating astronomers’ interest. Upon initial discovery, A11pl3Z was given a name but recently NASA has confirmed it as 3I/ATLAS, the third interstellar object out of four comets or asteroids discovered. Unlike the comets or asteroids which are bound to the sun’s asteroid belt and viewable ...
Jupiter-sized exoplanets which emerge as a proxy for accelerating self-sabotage by instigating tremendous outbursts from their parent stars seem as violations to the conventional structure of planetary systems; astronomers have identified such a diabolic planet, HIP 67522 b. Located within its parent star’s magnetic field, HIP 67522 b’s orbital position subjects it to flare beams ...
The irrefutable visual proof of a star dying in a spectacular “double detonation,” the explosive death of a star which occurs in twinned strokes, has now been recorded. This event marks the first instance of a white dwarf star undergoing two rapid explosions. The unprecedented finding offers new insights into the supernova remnant SNR 0509-67.5, ...
Astronomers have been trying to figure out what “hot Jupiters” are for decades. These are gas giants that orbit very close to their stars and complete a full revolution in just a few hours. But their rarer cousins, double hot Jupiters, are even more mysterious. In a binary star system, two of these planets orbit ...
Astronomers have found a rare Jupiter-sized planet hiding at the edge of the Milky Way using a phenomenon that Albert Einstein predicted more than a hundred years ago. This is part of a cosmic detective story that has been going on for years. Gravitational microlensing, which uses the bending of space-time itself, found the exoplanet ...
Asteroid 2024 YR4, which used to be thought to be on a collision course with Earth and could “kill a city,” has changed course and is now 4.3% likely to hit the Moon in December 2032 instead of hurting our planet. If it hits, it could send a lot of lunar debris flying, some of ...
Astronomers were confused when the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) first saw strange, free-floating pairs of Jupiter-sized objects in 2023. These strange cosmic objects, called “JuMBOs” (Jupiter-mass binary objects), seemed to go against the usual ideas about how planets form because they didn’t have a parent star and were drifting through space in tight gravitational ...
A young star is surrounded by a swirling disk of gas and dust in the depths of the cosmos. This disk is full of alcohol. Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have found methanol, an important organic molecule, in the protoplanetary disk of a star called HD 100453. This star is 330 light-years ...
NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) took the first pictures of Japan’s doomed Resilience moon lander. The pictures show a grim scene: broken pieces of the lander spread out across the moon’s surface. The spacecraft, made by the Tokyo-based company ispace, was supposed to make a historic soft landing on June 5, but it didn’t and ...
