NASA Prevents Space Wreck; Black Hole Winds; Oldest Fossils Found
NASA Prevents a Wreck at Mars The folks at NASA’s MAVEN program recently had to give their spacecraft a small unscheduled course correction so that it wouldn’t smash into Mars’s moon Phobos. The spacecraft that’s been circling the Red Planet for a little over two years conducted a motor burn that give it a slight […]
Odd Feature from Galactic Collision; Crack in the Magnetosphere; Smartphones Make Us Trust Less?
Galactic Fender-Bender Produces Eye-Lid Shaped Feature A team of astronomers say what started as a fender-bender between two galaxies has sent a torrent of stars and gas crashing through the center of one, which then produced a rare eyelid shaped star formation. Working with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), in Chile, the astronomers identified […]
Where are Ceres Large Craters?
After NASA’s Dawn spacecraft had passed by the asteroid Vesta, on its way to rendezvous with Ceres, mission scientists noticed that its surface was banged up with a lot of very large craters. Its biggest impact crater is Rheasilvia, which measures 505 km in diameter. They expected that Ceres would also be seriously pitted with giant impact basins too. […]
Space Snow Spotted; Frankenstein Galaxy; Fewer Allergies for Thumb Suckers
Astronomers Spot Snow Circling New Star For the first time, astronomers have been able to get a glimpse of a water “snowline” in a protoplanetary disk, which is the material surrounding a new star that may later form into planets. This water “snowline” marks the point within these left overs of star formation where the temperature […]
Antarctic Glacier Melt Could Raise Global Sea Level by Nearly 3 Meters
An international group of scientists say if climate change continues at its current rate, Antarctica’s Totten Glacier might become so unstable that it could eventually release enough water to produce an almost 3 meter rise in the global sea-level sometime in the next several hundred years. A year ago, this same group of scientists from […]
Trio of Planets Found Circling “Ultra-cool” Star Might Support Life
An international team of astronomers has discovered three exoplanets that could possibly host alien life. The trio of planets are circling an “ultra-cool” brown dwarf that’s located about 40 light years from Earth, in the constellation of Aquarius. “Ultra-cool” dwarf stars are those that that are much cooler and redder than our Sun, and only […]
Zika Kills Cells Crucial to Brain Development; Did Volcanoes Cause Mars to Tilt?
Study: Zika Virus Infects and Kills Fetal Cerebral Cortex Cells This birth defect can cause babies to be born with an unusually small head and inhibited brain development. The scientists, who made their findings based on experiments performed with lab-grown human stem cells, discovered that the Zika virus is attracted to and infects the cells […]
Antarctic Dinosaur Hunt; 60 Days in Bed For Science; Noise May Disturb Sea Floor Ecosystem
Did Some of Today’s Species Get Their Start in Antarctica? We know Antarctica is the land of snow and ice and is the coldest place on Earth. But believe it or not, this polar continent, was once quite warm, due to the different, earlier atmosphere. Antarctica was covered with lush vegetation and teeming with a […]
Bright Spots on Ceres; Sorry No Alien Structure; New Lie-Detector
Scientists Learn More about Dwarf Planet Ceres Scientists think they may know what’s behind the mysterious bright spots on the Ceres and where the dwarf planet may have originated. Studying data gathered by NASA’S Dawn spacecraft the researchers outlined their findings in a pair of new studies published in the journal Nature. In one study, […]
Oxygen Found in Comet’s Atmosphere; Making Robots Walk Like Humans
Scientists Find Oxygen in Comet’s Atmosphere A couple of days ago we told you about the discovery of a boozy comet that dispensed large amounts of alcohol, sugar and other organic compounds as it made its pass by the sun last January. Now, researchers from the Center for Space and Habitability (CSH) at the University […]