Astronomy, features and articles | Educational Science

Aug 31, 2020

The moon is rusty, and it’s likely Earth's fault

The moon is turning ever so slightly red, and it's likely Earth's fault. Our planet's atmosphere may be causing the moon to rust, new research finds. Rust, also known as an iron oxide, is a reddish compound that forms when iron is exposed to water and oxygen. Rust is the...

Aug 31, 2020

Why is space a vacuum?

Space is an almost perfect vacuum, full of cosmic voids. And in short, gravity is to blame. But to really understand the vacuum of our universe, we have to take a moment to understand what a vacuum really is — and what it's not. So, what is a vacuum, and...

Aug 31, 2020

Earth's new minimoon might be a rocket humans launched into space in the 1960s

Earth is getting a small new moon, but it might have been made by people. Astronomers at the Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona first detected the object back in February as a flash of light darting across space. BIG NEWS (thread 1/3). Earth has a new temporarily captured object/Possible mini-moon...

Aug 31, 2020

There's no speed limit in a superfluid universe. Now we know why.

In the cold, dense medium of a helium-3 superfluid, scientists recently made an unexpected discovery. A foreign object travelling through the medium could exceed a critical speed limit without breaking the fragile superfluid itself. As this contradicts our understanding of superfluidity, it presented quite a puzzle - but now, by...

Jul 31, 2020

Entire cities could fit inside the moon's monstrous lava tubes

Mars is pockmarked with absolutely massive lava tubes, with ceilings as high as the Empire State Building, new research shows. And the moon hosts even more gargantuan tubes, with heights that dwarf Dubai's Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest building, and skylights as big as football fields. These yawning, subterranean caverns,...

Jul 31, 2020

How Earth's gravity changed record-breaking asteroid's path forever

The record-breaking asteroid 2020 QG won't soon forget its run-in with Earth. Early Sunday morning (Aug. 16), the car-sized 2020 QG zoomed just 1,830 miles (2,950 kilometers) above the Indian Ocean, making the closest known flyby by an asteroid that didn't end up slamming into our planet. Though 2020 QG...

Jul 31, 2020

How long is a galactic year?

Humans are used to keeping time by measuring Earth's movement relative to the sun. But while Earth's trips around its star are noteworthy to life on our pale blue dot, that journey is pretty insignificant when compared with the epic voyage that carries the sun — and our entire solar...

Jul 31, 2020

This week's full moon happens only once every 3 years

This week, for the first time in three years, the September full moon is in a unique situation: it's happening so early in the month — a timing that gives it an entirely different name, the corn moon, instead of the harvest moon — that it sets the stage for...

Jun 30, 2020

How to watch the 'Independence Day' lunar eclipse

Bummed about Fourth of July fireworks being canceled in your area? Don't be: There will be an even bigger celestial treat for skygazers this weekend; a full moon and a partial penumbral eclipse will be visible this Saturday and Sunday (July 4-5). The timing isn't a coincidence — lunar eclipses...

Jun 30, 2020

Can energy be sucked out of a black hole?

A rotating black hole is such an extreme force of nature that it drags surrounding time and space around with it. So it is only natural to ask whether black holes could be used as some sort of energy source. In 1969, mathematical physicist Roger Penrose proposed a method to...

Jun 30, 2020

Origin of 'Mirach's Ghost' perplexes black hole scientists

About 10 million light-years from Earth, a blurry galaxy named Mirach's Ghost may help unravel a dark mystery: where the largest black holes in the universe came from. But this ghostly galaxy has also deepened the mystery surrounding these objects' births. A black hole is a singularity, a region in...

Jun 30, 2020

28 'cocooned' black holes found hiding in plain sight

More than two dozen missing cocooned black holes have been rediscovered, after researchers took a new look at X-ray maps of the sky. All of these singularities had been misclassified as distant galaxies or other types of black holes. All 28 of the objects are supermassive black holes, billions of...

Jun 30, 2020

NASA: Mars rover Perseverance in 'safe mode' after launch, but should recover

NASA is celebrating the launch of its most advanced Mars rover ever today (July 30), even as engineers tackle a glitch that left the spacecraft in a protective safe mode shortly after liftoff. The Mars 2020 Perseverance rover launched toward the Red Planet at 7:50 a.m. EDT (1150 GMT), riding...

May 31, 2020

Half the matter in the universe was missing. Scientists just found it hiding in the cosmos.

In the late 1990s, cosmologists made a prediction about how much ordinary matter there should be in the universe. About 5%, they estimated, should be regular stuff with the rest a mixture of dark matter and dark energy. But when cosmologists counted up everything they could see or measure at...

May 31, 2020

The 'mole' on Mars is finally underground after a push from NASA's InSight lander

There's a light at the end of the tunnel for the first mole to burrow into the surface of Mars, scientists hope. Not a furry mole, of course; the term is the nickname for the instrument formally known as the Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package on board NASA's InSight...