Space Exploration News – Latest Headlines

Researchers identify zebra-like stripes of plasma in a patch of space

The structure may help scientists identify radiation-remediation strategies in space.

July 14, 2015 Read more

What happens when cosmic giants meet galactic dwarfs?

When two different sized galaxies smash together, the larger galaxy stops the smaller one making new stars, according to a study of more than 20,000 merging galaxies.

July 13, 2015 Read more

Scientists study atmosphere of Venus through transit images

Two of NASA's heliophysics missions can now claim planetary science on their list of scientific findings. A group of scientists used the Venus transit - a very rare event where a planet passes between Earth and the sun, appearing to us as a dark dot steadily making its way across the sun's bright face - to make measurements of how the Venusian atmosphere absorbs different kinds of light.

July 9, 2015 Read more

NASA's Swift reveals a black hole bull's-eye

What looks like a shooting target is actually an image of nested rings of X-ray light centered on an erupting black hole. On June 15, NASA's Swift satellite detected the start of a new outburst from V404 Cygni, where a black hole and a sun-like star orbit each other.

July 9, 2015 Read more

Astronomers find a massive black hole that outgrew its galaxy

Astronomers have spotted a super-sized black hole in the early universe that grew much faster than its host galaxy. The discovery runs counter to most observations about black holes In most cases, black holes and their host galaxies expand at the same rate.

July 9, 2015 Read more

Data shows surfer-shaped waves in near-Earth space

Named Kelvin-Helmholtz waves in the late 1800s after their discoverers, these waves have since been discovered all over the universe: in clouds, in the atmospheres of other planets, and on the sun. Now two recently published papers highlight these shapely waves at the boundaries of near-Earth space.

July 9, 2015 Read more

Bricks to build an Earth found in every planetary system

Earth-like planets orbiting other stars in the Milky Way are three times more likely to have the same type of minerals as Earth than astronomers had previously thought. In fact, conditions for making the building blocks of Earth-like rocks are ubiquitous throughout the Milky Way.

July 8, 2015 Read more

A black hole under the gravitational lens

An unusual observation method uncovers processes near the event horizon of a distant, massive monster.

July 6, 2015 Read more

Astronomers predict fireworks from a close encounter of the stellar kind (w/video)

Astronomers are predicting a close encounter between a stellar remnant the size of a city and one of the brightest stars in the Milky Way.

July 3, 2015 Read more

Dark matter map begins to reveal the Universe's early history

Researchers have begun a wide-area survey of the distribution of dark matter in the universe using Hyper Suprime-Cam, a new wide-field camera installed on the Subaru Telescope in Hawai'i.

July 2, 2015 Read more

Discovering a new stage in the galactic lifecycle

Astronomers have been able to observe the dust contents of galaxies as seen just 1 billion years after the Big Bang - a time period known as redshift 5-6. These are the earliest average-sized galaxies to ever be directly observed and characterized in this way.

July 1, 2015 Read more

NASA missions monitor a waking black hole

NASA's Swift satellite detected a rising tide of high-energy X-rays from the constellation Cygnus on June 15, just before 2:32 p.m. EDT. About 10 minutes later, the Japanese experiment on the International Space Station called the Monitor of All-sky X-ray Image (MAXI) also picked up the flare.

July 1, 2015 Read more

New model of cosmic stickiness favors 'Big Rip' demise of universe

The universe can be a very sticky place, but just how sticky is a matter of debate. That is because for decades cosmologists have had trouble reconciling the classic notion of viscosity based on the laws of thermodynamics with Einstein's general theory of relativity. However, a team has come up with a fundamentally new mathematical formulation of the problem that appears to bridge this long-standing gap.

June 30, 2015 Read more

Seeing a supernova in a new light

Type Ia supernovae are the 'standard candles' astrophysicists use to chart distance in the Universe. But are these dazzling exploding stars truly all the same? To answer this, scientists must first understand what causes stars to explode and become supernovae. Recently, a unique collaborative project provided a rare glimpse of the process.

June 30, 2015 Read more

Precise ages of largest number of stars hosting planets ever measured

New study shows that even stars older than 11 billion years have Earth-like planets.

June 29, 2015 Read more

Unexpectedly little black-hole monsters rapidly suck up surrounding matter

Astronomers have found evidence that enigmatic objects in nearby galaxies - called ultra-luminous X-ray sources (ULXs) - exhibit strong outflows that are created as matter falls onto their black holes at unexpectedly high rates. The strong outflows suggest that the black holes in these ULXs must be much smaller than expected.

June 26, 2015 Read more

New NASA supercomputer model shows planet making waves in nearby debris disk (w/video)

A new NASA supercomputer simulation of the planet and debris disk around the nearby star Beta Pictoris reveals that the planet's motion drives spiral waves throughout the disk, a phenomenon that causes collisions among the orbiting debris.

June 25, 2015 Read more

Giant galaxy is still growing

Astronomers have applied a clever observational trick to clearly show that the nearby giant elliptical galaxy Messier 87 merged with a smaller spiral galaxy in the last billion years.

June 25, 2015 Read more