NASA’s Boomerang-Like Aircraft, Kid Athletes Excel in Class, Citrus and Skin Cancer
Boomerang-Like Aircraft Could Help NASA Find Landing Sites on Mars NASA has built a prototype of what it hopes to be the first aircraft to fly on Mars sometime in the 2020’s. Shaped like a boomerang, the flying wing Prandtl-m will be rather small, with a 61 cm wingspan, and weighing only about 454 grams. […]
June 2015 Science Images
Slumbering Giant Black Hole Awakes After 26 Years
Some 8,000 light years from Earth, in the constellation Cygnus, a binary system known as V404 Cygni has come to life for the first time in 26 years. While most binary systems consist of two stars orbiting a common center of mass, V404 Cygni is made up of a black hole and a star that […]
Ultra-Dark Galaxies; Exoplanet With Comet-Like Tail; New Dinosaur Species
Astronomers Find Huge Treasure Trove of Ultra-Dark Galaxies U.S. and Japanese researchers have discovered 854 “ultra dark galaxies” located within the Coma Cluster, about 321 million light years from Earth. Dark galaxies are described as those that are totally composed of or are mostly filled with dark matter, which cannot be seen by telescopes. Nevertheless, […]
Science Scanner: Cat Videos Can Help You, Permanent Dust Cloud Surrounds Moon
Watching Cat Videos Can Give You a Boost You can hardly surf the Internet without stumbling across a cat video, and new research suggests those videos could actually be good for you. Of all the categories of YouTube video content, videos of cats have had more views per video. It’s been suggested that there were […]
Astronomers Image Birth of a Planetary Nebula in Sharp Detail
For the first time ever, a team of astronomers have captured stunning pictures of one of the universe’s most impressive sights: the birth of a bipolar ‘planetary nebula.’ The scientists gathered the images of nebula surrounding L2 Puppis using the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope or VLT, in the Atacama Desert of northern […]
Science Scanner: Monster Galaxy; Mars Missions On Vacation
Monster Galaxy Found Near Edge of Universe A group of researchers imaged a “monstrous galaxy” – SDP.81, located some 11.7 billion light-years from Earth, using the Atacama Large Millimeter/sub-millimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile and a natural magnification method called “gravitational lensing.” The researchers used the gravity of a massive galaxy 3.4 billion light-years away to […]
Pluto Moons Dance in Chaotic Orbit
Pluto and its moons seem to be engaged in a kind of chaotic dance routine with each other. After a thorough analysis of data gathered by the Hubble Space Telescope, NASA scientists found that Nix and Hydra – two of Pluto’s five known moons – are wobbling and behaving erratically as they orbit the distant […]
Science Images from May 2015
Science Scanner: Sea Salt on Europa; Natural Sunblock; ISS Crew Return Delayed
Sea Salt Covers Parts of Europa’s Surface Scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory found evidence that the dark material that covers parts of the surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa is probably sea salt produced by an ocean beneath its surface. The researchers believe that the existence of sea salt on the moon’s icy surface implies […]