1+ hour, 26+ min ago   (818+ words) Comets inhabit the cold reaches of the Solar System: the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud. Occasionally, one passes through the inner Solar System, but mostly they keep to themselves out there. These dirty snowballs are agglomerations of rock and…...

4+ hour, 35+ min ago   (249+ words) Scientists have known that Mars has water for some years, documenting ice beneath the surface, moisture locked in soil, and vapour drifting through the thin atmosphere. The challenge facing future human missions isn't finding water on the Red Planet, it's…...

4+ hour, 44+ min ago   (291+ words) Circumsecondary disks happen when a disk of gas and dust forms around a second object in a binary system, which then occults the first, dramatically dropping its brightness over a period of time. In the case of J0705+0612, that happened most…...

4+ hour, 49+ min ago   (185+ words) Computer generated image of space debris objects in Earth orbit (Credit : NASA) Fernando and colleague Constantinos Charalambous from Imperial College London tested their seismic tracking method on China's Shenzhou-15 orbital module when it reentered on 2 April 2024. Measuring just over 1 metre…...

4+ hour, 50+ min ago   (191+ words) Bacteria and the viruses that infect them have been locked in an evolutionary battle for billions of years. Bacteria evolve defences against viral infection and viruses develop new ways to breach those defences. This process shapes microbial ecosystems across Earth,…...

19+ hour, 10+ min ago   (783+ words) The Circinus Galaxy, a galaxy about 13 million light-years away, contains an active supermassive black hole that continues to influence its evolution. The largest source of infrared light from the region closest to the black hole itself was thought to be…...

2+ day, 19+ hour ago   (288+ words) We live near a fusion reactor in space that provides all our heat and light. That reactor is also responsible for the creation of various elements heavier than hydrogen, and that's true of all stars. So, how do we know…...

2+ day, 23+ hour ago   (374+ words) Some galaxies in the early universe were absolute powerhouses, churning out stars at rates that would dwarf the Milky Way's modest stellar production. These "monster galaxies," buried deep in dust between 10 and 12 billion years ago, are thought to be the…...

2+ day, 23+ hour ago   (367+ words) A team of predominantly Canadian researchers are using massive galaxy clusters and the JWST to study low-mass galaxies from 13.5 billion years ago all the way up to 5 billion years ago. The clusters are used as gravitational lenses to expand the…...

3+ day, 7+ hour ago   (543+ words) As they roll across shadowed regions of the moon's surface, future lunar rovers could develop hazardous buildups of electric charge on their wheels. Through new analysis published in Advances in Space Research, Bill Farrell at the Space Science Institute in…...