Mapping the moon

Two NASA probes that spent last year orbiting the moon have returned stunning new geological maps that could help explain how it, Earth, and other planets in our solar system formed. The probes, named Ebb and Flow, flew identical orbits just miles above the moon’s surface to measure its gravity field. Slight disruptions in their paths—caused by the push and […]

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Black holes that wander

Supermassive black holes that have escaped their host galaxies may be wandering the universe alone. Intriguing new observations i by NASA’s Chandra X-ray telescope have | revealed what appears to be a supermassive | black hole being “kicked out of a galaxy at enormous speed,” Francesca Civano of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics tells Space.com. Astronomers observed two distinct light […]

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Russia has plans to nuke Earth-bound asteroids, if necessary

From 2012 to 2015, Russia researched ways of deflecting Earth-bound asteroids using nuclear weapons and came up with a best-case scenario. The Central Scientific Research Institute of Machine Building, an arm of Russia’s state-run Roscosmos space agency, worked on the asteroid problem with other countries (including the United States) in a program called NEOShield, which was largely funded by the […]

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Dark matter is (probably) more complex than you think

Scientists typically believe that dark matter behaves in a simple way: if one clump encounters another, the two interact solely through gravity. However, researchers have published findings which suggest that there’s more involved. They’ve noticed dark matter (the blue lines in the photo above) lagging behind a galaxy due to friction, hinting that there are factors beyond gravity at work. […]

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A monster black hole

An international team of astronomers has detected a colossal black hole that is 12 billion times more massive than the sun—so big that it is challenging accepted cosmological thinking. Scientists discovered the enormous celestial body, which is 12.8 billion light-years from Earth, at the center of a brilliantly glowing quasar, a cloud of gas that gets superheated and gives off […]

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If aliens were heading towards the Earth, would we see them coming?

Imagine a pivotal scene from your favorite sci-fi alien invasion movie where their 50-foot wide laser beams destroy our buildings like sneezing on a pile of flour. What could we do? We’re merely meat muppets with pitiful silicon based technology. How could we ever hope to detect these aliens with their stealth spacecraft and 3rd stage guild navigators? If we’re […]

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Titan’s Surface Much Like That of Earth

Titan's Surface Much Like That of Earth

Saturn’s moon Titan may be light-years away from Earth, but the two bodies have many characteristics in common: Wind, rain, volcanoes, tectonics and other Earth-like conditions all sculpt features on Titan, but act in an environment many times colder than Antarctica. “It is really surprising how closely Titan’s surface resembles Earth’s,” said Rosaly Lopes, a planetary geologist at NASA’s Jet […]

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Relics of the big bang

Astronomers have discovered two clouds of gas some 12 billion light-years away that appear to preserve the primordial conditions of the universe in the minutes after the big bang. The clouds contain just hydrogen and its isotope deuterium, making them “the first examples to fit precisely” into what scientists think the early universe was like, University of California astronomer Jason […]

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