Scientists Observe Rare Black Hole Event
For many here in the United States, today, Friday 11/27/15 is something called Black Friday. It’s unofficially considered to be the first shopping day of the Christmas season and many Americans mark it by heading out to shopping centers and stores in droves in hopes of finding bargains. NASA is marking the day too; only […]
NASA’S MAVEN Solves Mars Atmosphere Mystery
Last month NASA dropped a bombshell when it announced it had found evidence of water flowing on Mars. Yesterday the space agency held a press conference at its Washington headquarters to announce that they may have solved a decades-old mystery of what happened to the Martian atmosphere and its water, when they presented new findings […]
September 2015 Science Images
NASA Says Water Flows on Mars
Today, NASA confirmed evidence of the presence of liquid water flowing on present-day Mars. It’s most likely that any flowing Martian water is salty and not pure. “Our quest on Mars has been to ‘follow the water,’ in our search for life in the universe, and now we have convincing science that validates what we’ve […]
Scientists Find Jupiter’s Younger Sibling
A group of scientists have discovered a new exoplanet they say resembles a young Jupiter. Called 51 Eridani b, the gas giant is about 100 light years away, has twice the mass of Jupiter, orbits its star – 51 Eridani – at a distance comparable to between Saturn and Uranus in our solar system and […]
New Horizons Team Relieved After Spacecraft Phones Home
It took a little more than thirteen hours after NASA’s New Horizons mission made its historic close encounter with Pluto and its five known moons, but the piano-sized spacecraft finally phoned home to say that it’s OK and that the fly-by went according to plan. Anxious members of the New Horizons mission team at the […]
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 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 […]
Astronomers Observe Exoplanet Temperatures Swinging Wildly
For the first time ever, scientists in the United Kingdom detected temperature fluctuations on a super-Earth exoplanet – 55 Cancri e, the so-called “diamond planet.” Using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope to study the rocky exoplanet’s thermal radiation over a two-year period, researchers led by the University of Cambridge found that the temperature on the side […]
Calling ET: NASA Expands Search for Alien Life
The search for life beyond our own solar system has taken a major step forward with a new interdisciplinary research coalition devoted to the search for life in the cosmos. Nexus for Exoplanet System Science (NExSS) will be made up of research teams from several NASA facilities, 10 U.S. universities and two research institutions, according […]