New theory explains possible origin of plummeting Chicxulub impactor that struck off Mexico It was tens of miles wide and forever changed history when it crashed into Earth about 66 million years ago. The Chicxulub impactor, as it’s known, left behind a crater off the coast of Mexico that spansContinue Reading
Evidence of landslides on Mars may also raise the prospects that the Red Planet was once hospitable to life. A new study, published Feb. 3 in the journal Science Advances, found that melting ice is combining with the Red Planet’s salty subsurface permafrost, resulting in a chemical reaction that createsContinue Reading
When a star collapses, it throws its solar system into total chaos. Sometimes, that chaos leaves a mark. Astronomers are looking for the bones of dead planets inside the corpses of dead stars — and they may have just found some. In a paper published Feb. 11 in the journalContinue Reading
Don’t panic; it won’t get that close. An asteroid as wide as the Golden Gate Bridge is long will hurtle past Earth next month. But although it will be the biggest and speediest asteroid to fly by our planet this year, there’s no reason to panic. The space rock, officiallyContinue Reading
The electrons are trapped in an endless loop around the planet. In the swirl of a perfect solar storm, electrons can get trapped near Earth, where they can accelerate to nearly the speed of light. These electrons get their zip from surfing on waves of super-heated, charged gas called plasmaContinue Reading
Cosmic accelerators in the galaxy blast out extremely energetic particles, the find suggests The Milky Way glows with a gamma ray haze, with energies vastly exceeding anything physicists can produce on Earth, according to a new paper. Gamma rays detected in the study, to be published in Physical Review Letters,Continue Reading
Water-rich steam might envelop the far-flung planets, experiments suggest Burning bits of ground-up meteorites may tell scientists what exoplanets’ early atmospheres are made of. A set of experiments baking the pulverized space rocks suggests that rocky planets had early atmospheres full of water, astrophysicist Maggie Thompson of the University ofContinue Reading
Three decades after Cornell astronomer Carl Sagan suggested that Voyager 1 snap Earth’s picture from billions of miles away — resulting in the iconic Pale Blue Dot photograph — two astronomers now offer another unique cosmic perspective: Some exoplanets — planets from beyond our own solar system — have aContinue Reading
NASA’s Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) spacecraft unfurled its robotic arm Tuesday, and in a first for the agency, briefly touched an asteroid to collect dust and pebbles from the surface for delivery to Earth in 2023. This well-preserved, ancient asteroid, known as Bennu, is currentlyContinue Reading
Before humans first started sending objects into Earth orbit, the pocket of space around our planet was clear and clean. But the launch of Sputnik 1 in October of 1957 changed everything. Since then, the space debris has been accumulating, with the amount of useless, defunct satellites vastly outnumbering theContinue Reading
