In the weeks following its launch in early 2006, when NASA's New Horizons was still close to home, it took just minutes to transmit a command to the spacecraft, and hear back that the onboard computer received and was ready ...
Space Exploration
Apr 19, 2021
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13768
At the center of our galaxy lies a swirling, energy-spewing supermassive black hole called Sagittarius A* or Sgr A*, for short. For billions of years, surrounding gas and dust have been falling into it. Every 10,000 years ...
Astronomy
Oct 15, 2018
27
178
Binary black hole mergers are fascinating cosmological events, which have been theorized to be the among the strongest sources of gravitational waves in the universe. While astrophysicists have carried out extensive research ...
In the 1800s scientists studying things like heat and the behavior of low density gases developed a theory known as thermodynamics. As the name suggests, this theory describes the dynamic behavior of heat (or more generally ...
Astronomy
Sep 10, 2014
14
8
Black holes form natural time machines that allow travel to both the past and the future. But don't expect to be heading back to visit the dinosaurs any time soon.
Astronomy
Jan 4, 2023
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387
The newest high-resolution images of Pluto from NASA's New Horizons are both dazzling and mystifying, revealing a multitude of previously unseen topographic and compositional details. The image below—showing an area near ...
Space Exploration
Sep 25, 2015
7
1486
Since black holes are the most powerful gravitational spots in the entire Universe, can they distort light so much that it actually goes into orbit? And what would it look like if you could survive and follow light in this ...
Astronomy
Mar 25, 2014
89
2
Pluto's day is 6.4 Earth days long. The images were taken by the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) and the Ralph/Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera as the distance between New Horizons and Pluto decreased from 5 ...
Space Exploration
Nov 20, 2015
4
671
A new image from the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration—which includes scientists from the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA)— has uncovered strong and organized magnetic fields spiraling from ...
Astronomy
Mar 27, 2024
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191
The nitrogen ice glaciers on Pluto appear to carry an intriguing cargo: numerous, isolated hills that may be fragments of water ice from Pluto's surrounding uplands. These hills individually measure one to several miles or ...
Space Exploration
Feb 4, 2016
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1559
