Just 48 short years ago, movie director George Lucas used the phrase "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away" as the opening to the first "Star Wars" movie, later labeled "Episode IV: A New Hope." But at least four important ...
In a landmark achievement for fusion energy, ITER has completed all components for the world's largest, most powerful pulsed superconducting electromagnet system.
The Southwest Research Institute-led Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere (PUNCH) mission collected its first images following its March 11 launch into polar orbit around Earth. The mission's four small suitcase-sized ...
A Southwest Research Institute-led study modeled the chemistry of TOI-270 d, an exoplanet between Earth and Neptune in size, finding evidence that it could be a giant rocky planet shrouded in a thick, hot atmosphere. TOI-270 ...
Spintronics, an emerging field of technology, exploits the spin of electrons rather than their charge to process and store information. Spintronics could lead to faster, more power-efficient computers and memory devices. ...
One of the most powerful objects in the universe is a radio quasar—a spinning black hole spraying out highly energetic particles. Come too close to one, and you'd get sucked in by its gravitational pull, or burn up from the ...
The European Space Agency (ESA) has powered down its Gaia spacecraft after more than a decade spent gathering data that are now being used to unravel the secrets of our home galaxy.
The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) is mapping millions of celestial objects to better understand dark energy—the mysterious driver of our universe's accelerating expansion. Today, the DESI collaboration released ...
A recent study reveals that the famous Wolf-Rayet 104 "pinwheel star" holds more mystery but is even less likely to be the potential "death star" it was once thought to be.
In the cold, lightless Pacific Ocean deep, the seabed is scattered with metal-rich rocks coveted by miners—and huge numbers of strange and rare animals almost entirely unknown to science.
