Space

Aliens are serious science. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI, constitutes major research projects at radio telescopes the world over, and it is championed by the non-profit institute that shares its name. Multiple experiments on the subject, and citizen science projects like [email protected], have been going strong for...

Aliens are serious science. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI, constitutes major research projects at radio telescopes the world over, and it is championed by the non-profit institute that shares its name. Multiple experiments on the subject, and citizen science projects like [email protected], have been going strong for...

Aliens are serious science. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI, constitutes major research projects at radio telescopes the world over, and it is championed by the non-profit institute that shares its name. Multiple experiments on the subject, and citizen science projects like [email protected], have been going strong for...

Thank our wobbly planet for our seasons, which have led to remarkable adaptations in animals ranging from honeybees to lungfish. 1. Don’t look to Pete Seeger’s lyric “turn, turn, turn” to explain the seasons. It’s really tilt, tilt, tilt. Earth has seasons because its axis is tilted about 23.5 degrees,...

On October 31, 1936, six young tinkerers nicknamed the “Rocket Boys” nearly incinerated themselves in an effort to break free of Earth’s gravity. The group had huddled in a gully in the foothills of California’s San Gabriel Mountains to test a small alcohol-fueled jet engine. They wanted to prove...

The task ended up falling to one of Dunkley’s former graduate students, Graeme Addison, now a cosmologist at Johns Hopkins University. Addison began exploring yet another way to reckon the expansion of the universe, this time by looking at vibrations from the Big Bang that left an enormous pattern...

One section of this Moon rock (arrow) has a strangely Earthlike composition–most likely because it started out here before being blasted to the Moon by an asteroid impact 4 billion years ago. That would make it the oldest known intact sample of our planet. (Credit: NASA/USRA) It has been a...

Want to start a space colony? Even if you don’t, space agencies across the globe do. Whether it’s a moon base now, à la the Trump administration’s plans for NASA, or a Mars landing later, such a colony will need a lot of power. And given the possibility of...

Flashes of Light Already, that growing snowbank of data has produced some surprises. The latest twist in the FRB story came from a project at the Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) radio telescope in October, when astronomers announced the discovery of 20 bright FRBs, nearly doubling the total number...

The best-yet view of MU69 (aka Ultima Thule) from New Horizons, showing craters and intriguing hints of layering. The larger lobe appears to have a thick-pancake shape. Even sharper views are still stored in the solid-state memory aboard the spacecraft. (Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI) It was a New Year’s Eve like no...