By analyzing the images obtained with Pan-STARRS, astronomers have serendipitously discovered a new protoplanetary disk located some 800 light years away.
On new recently released NASA images show the moons of Saturn in all their glory, as if they came straight out of the pages of science fiction.
NASA scientists are just getting started in their analysis of fragments brought back from the Bennu asteroid, and the early indications are that the material it contains originated from an ancient ocean world.
Early analysis of the fragments has shown something equally rare. The meteorite is an aubrite, a class with unknown origins that some scientists argue may be pieces of the planet Mercury.
The moon has shrunk by more than 45 metres in circumference over the last few hundred million years because of its core gradually cooling.
The beginning of the Universe has always been something of a chicken-and-egg problem. Did stars and galaxies form first, with black holes slowly coalescing in their midst? Or did black holes appear before the first galaxies?
Saturn's small, crater-covered moon Mimas may have a vast ocean under its thick icy surface, according to a new paper.
On February 3, 2024, NASA’s Juno spacecraft made a second close flyby of Io, the third largest of Jupiter’s moons. We were able to see a volcunic erruption there like never before.
If confirmed, these would be the first directly-imaged planets that are similar to the giant planets in our own Solar System, and they would demonstrate that widely separated giant planets like Jupiter survive stellar evolution.
A “super-Earth” ripe for further investigation orbits a small, reddish star that is, by astronomical standards, fairly close to us – only 137 light-years away.
We don’t usually think of planets as having tails, like comets, but sometimes they do. One giant hot Jupiter exoplanet WASP-69b has a tail of gas much longer than previously estimated.
A team of scientists have performed an intensive investigation of Ryugu samples, discovering evidence that points to cometary organic matter being transported from space to the near-Earth region.
It’s oh-so-easy to be absolutely mesmerized by these spiral galaxies. Follow their clearly defined arms, which are brimming with stars, to their centers, where there may be old star clusters and – sometimes – active supermassive black holes.
Certainly, we could tap into all the heat and kinetic energy of a black hole's accretion disk and jets, but even if all you had was a black hole in empty space, you could still extract energy from a trick known as the Penrose process.
A small black hole is helping scientists understand how mysterious cosmic rays can barrel through the Universe and hit Earth at nearly the speed of light.
