For the first time, the boundary of the heliosphere has been mapped, giving scientists a better understanding of how solar and interstellar winds interact.
Astronomy
Jun 14, 2021
1
7070
The search for life beyond Earth typically focuses on first looking for water, the basis for life as we know it. Whether the water is a gas, liquid, or solid, its presence and composition can tell researchers a lot about ...
Space Exploration
Jun 2, 2021
1
3
On May 20, 2021, the Polarimeter to UNify the Corona and Heliosphere (PUNCH) mission achieved an important milestone, passing NASA's Preliminary Design Review (PDR) of its spacecraft and payload experiments. Southwest Research ...
Space Exploration
May 25, 2021
1
13
Voyager 1—one of two sibling NASA spacecraft launched 44 years ago and now the most distant human-made object in space—still works and zooms toward infinity.
Astronomy
May 10, 2021
32
45135
When the four-decades-old Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft entered interstellar space in 2012 and 2018, respectively, scientists celebrated. These plucky spacecraft had already traveled 120 times the distance from the Earth ...
Astronomy
Apr 26, 2021
2
3147
In October 2017, humanity caught its first-ever glimpse of an interstellar object—a visitor from beyond our solar system—passing nearby the sun. We named it "Oumuamua, and its unusual properties fascinated and confounded ...
Astronomy
Apr 19, 2021
0
17
Eleven billion miles away—more than four times the distance from us to Pluto—lies the boundary of our solar system's magnetic bubble, the heliopause. Here the Sun's magnetic field, stretching through space like an invisible ...
Astronomy
Apr 16, 2021
3
363
New observations with the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (ESO's VLT) indicate that the rogue comet 2I/Borisov, which is only the second and most recently detected interstellar visitor to our Solar System, ...
Astronomy
Mar 30, 2021
1
4819
Much of the carbon in space is believed to exist in the form of large molecules called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). Since the 1980s, circumstantial evidence has indicated that these molecules are abundant in space, ...
Astronomy
Mar 18, 2021
13
936
The Vlasov-Poisson equations describe many important physical phenomena such as the distribution of gravitating particles in interstellar space, high-temperature plasma kinetics, and the Landau damping effect. A joint team ...
Mathematics
Feb 5, 2021
0
10
