Science

In the last few decades, we’ve gone from knowing of exactly zero exoplanets to several thousand. That’s largely thanks to the Kepler Space Telescope, but that mission is nearing its end. Luckily, NASA launched a successor several months ago. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) only started operating over the …

  In the Star Trek universe, the beloved character Spock hails from the planet Vulcan. This planet is, of course, entirely fictional. However, Star Trek producers eventually associated Vulcan with a real star near Earth called 40 Eridani A. New observations have revealed a planet in orbit of 40 Eridani …

The physics at work inside a neutron star can be mind-bogglingly complex. The neutrons that are well-understood in the rest of the universe do strange things when exposed to such incredible pressure. A new analysis of this so-called “nuclear pasta” suggests matter inside a neutron star is the strongest material …

It can be depressing that all the remarkable exoplanets scientists keep discovering are so mind-bogglingly far away. We obviously can’t visit them, but they’re also more difficult to study at such great distances. Proxima Centauri b offered a ray of hope when it was confirmed in orbit of our nearest …

Hubble may be old, but it can still survey incredibly distant objects in the universe. NASA is even undertaking a project to augment Hubble’s eyesight with the aid of some “natural telescopes” in deep space. Researchers hope that these new observations will tell us more about the structure of the …

SpaceX started talking about a crewed moon mission last year, and as usual, it claimed a very ambitious timeline. The original 2018 launch ended up delayed as it took longer than expected to get the Falcon Heavy ready for flight. Now, SpaceX says its first orbital moon mission is back …

The discovery of a small, 2mm drill hole in the Soyuz capsule attached to the International Space Station in late August sent a shock wave through both NASA and Roscosmos. The hole, which appears to have been drilled from inside the capsule, is roughly 2mm in diameter. While it never …

The technology to reach another planet or moon is only worth so much if you can’t land on it. Every landing has its own challenges, but celestial bodies with an atmosphere are particularly vexing. For decades, the heat shields that protect spacecraft during atmospheric entry have been rigid and heavy, …

There are a great many mysteries still to unravel in the cosmos, and we may be one step closer to solving one of them thanks to machine learning. Scientists from the University of California, Berkeley SETI Research Center have turned an AI loose on fast radio burst (FRB) data from …

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the most complex machine ever built by humanity. It took thousands of scientists from more than 100 countries to make the LHC a reality, and it became a reality exactly 10 years ago today. That’s when CERN completed the first full proton beam circulation inside …