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Dust and rocks residing on the surface of the moon take a beating in space. Without a protective magnetosphere and atmosphere like Earth's, the lunar surface faces continual particle bombardment from solar wind, cosmic rays, ...
Binary neutron star mergers occur millions of light-years away from Earth. Interpreting the gravitational waves they produce presents a major challenge for traditional data-analysis methods. These signals correspond to minutes ...
The shape of a planet's orbit is one of its fundamental properties, along with its size and distance from its host star. Earth has a nearly circular orbit, but some planets outside our solar system, called exoplanets, have ...
With a sun more than 4.5 billion years old, our solar system is considered "middle-aged," and the pictures of what it might have looked like in its infancy are lost to time. Taking advantage of a sophisticated adaptive optics ...
Hungarian researchers have discovered unique bacterial communities in thermal waters that may help unravel the development of stromatolites, one of Earth's oldest rock formations. These findings not only contribute to understanding ...
The puzzle of predicting how three gravitationally bound bodies move in space has challenged mathematicians for centuries, and has most recently been popularized in the novel and television show "3 Body Problem." There's ...
Radio astronomers see what the naked eye can't. As we study the sky with telescopes that record radio signals rather than light, we end up seeing a lot of circles.
Water may have first formed 100–200 million years after the Big Bang, according to a modeling paper published in Nature Astronomy. The authors suggest that the formation of water may have occurred in the universe earlier ...
From computer chips to image sensors in cameras, today's technology is overwhelmingly based on a semiconductor called silicon. This technology has been shrinking for decades—think of early room-sized computers compared ...
The seven other planets in our solar system will line up in the night sky on Friday evening for a rare alignment called a "planetary parade" that will not happen again until 2040.
