InSight spacecraft plunged into the rarefied atmosphere of Mars at a speed of more than 12,000 mph Monday and braked to a gentle touchdown, setting the stage for a two-year surface mission to probe the planet’s deep interior.
This object, a star, could have some sort of orbiting debris that periodically blocks the starlight, but researchers say they need more observations to figure out if that’s possible or if the flicker is caused by something else.
Recent research suggests that most, if not all, stars are born with a binary twin. Our Sun is a solitary star, but there's evidence to suggest that it did have a binary twin, once upon a time and it might have just been found.
Mars 2020 is set to visit the Red Planet to take scientific data and hunt for past signs of life, and to better understand the planet for a future human visit.
Virgin Orbit performed the first captive carry flight of its LauncherOne system Nov. 18. Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group, said he expected the first orbital launch to take place in December or January.
ALMA data show the most luminous galaxy in the universe has been caught in the act of stripping away nearly half the mass from at least three of its smaller neighbors.
Each year, the Insight competition reminds us of how amazing our Universe is.
With Thursday's launch, SpaceX has now flown 18 mission this year, tying its record set in 2017. The company could fly as many as four more rockets this year.
Supernovae happen all the time, but this one was different. "Cow," as astronomers are calling it, was a massively bright explosion 200 million light years away.
An international team has discovered a 31-km wide meteorite impact crater buried beneath the ice-sheet in the northern Greenland. This is the first time that a crater of any size has been found under one of Earth.
Scientists studying data from the ESA Gaia spacecraft have discovered a previously unknown dwarf galaxy lurking just outside the Milky Way, an extremely low-density swarm of stars two thirds the size of Earth’s galaxy.
Studying two decades of data on Barnard’s Star, astronomers have found a rocky super-Earth with a mass of at least 2.3 times that of Earth that orbits the star every 233 days or so.
More precisely, the Milky Way collided with the second galaxy, absorbing many of its stars and spiraling out a chaotic tangle of stellar matter — birthing new stars and altering the orbits of others.
The discovery of this approximately 13.5 billion-year-old tiny star means more stars with very low mass and very low metal content are likely out there—perhaps even some of the universe's very first stars.
