Nearby Supernovae Showered Earth and Moon With Radioactive Iron
Artist Animation of Star Explosion (NASA/JPL/Australian National University) Two new studies suggest radioactive bits of a nearby star or stars that exploded into a supernova or supernovae showered the Earth and Moon with radioactive iron a couple of million years ago. Both studies found the stellar evidence in concentrations of an isotope of iron called […]
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 […]
The Best Science Images – April 2015
NASA Lunar Explorer Has Smashing End
NASA’s Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer, or LADEE mission had a smashing ending early Friday morning when the US space agency crashed the spacecraft into the moon’s surface. The ground controllers, monitoring the spacecraft’s operations from NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, confirmed that it impacted the lunar surface as planned sometime […]
Moon May Have Formed From Earth’s Leftovers
The Earth and its moon started with a big bang, according to a new theory from NASA scientists, who believe both were born out of collisions between two massive developing planets.The new theory suggests the two giant planetary bodies, each about five times the size of Mars, collided with each other twice. After the first collision, […]
Neil Armstrong, First Man on the Moon, Dead at 82
Neil Armstrong, the first man to step onto the surface of the moon, died Saturday from heart-surgery related complications. He was 82. It was more than 40 years ago that Armstrong uttered the now-iconic words, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” forever sealing his place in history. He spoke the […]
Forty Years Later, US Flags Remain on Moon
Some of the most iconic moments in American history occurred when the Apollo astronauts planted U.S. flags on the lunar surface in the 1960s and 70s. It’s been nearly 40 years since Apollo 17, the final manned U.S. mission to the moon, left the last of six American flags on the its surface. What happened […]
European Scientists Hope to Send Humans Back to the Moon
A team of European scientists wants to send people back to the moon, ending the 40-year break from human lunar exploration. The group not only wants to see a resumption of lunar exploration, but it recommends those efforts be dramatically stepped-up. In a report to be published in “Planetary and Space Science,” the authors argue […]
Water on the Moon
Looking up at the Moon from our blue planet Earth, it’s hard to see anything other than a barren landscape. Devoid of any life, it’s a visual study in dusty shades of gray. But recently scientists from Case Western Reserve University, the Carnegie Institution for Science, and Brown University have found that parts of the […]