Tag Archives: space

When the solar system was first organizing itself, a disk of gas and dust took shape around the sun’s central mass. It eventually sorted itself into the system of planets we see today. But there are things we don’t know about how that happened. One observation that has been challenging …

One of the perks of being a science journalist is being regularly wowed by the very best images from the world’s various space agencies.  This week, Hubble was the darling, and the venerable space telescope has provided us these five absolutely beautiful images of stars, galaxies, and nebulae. We’ll start …

A pair of molecular clouds known as Taurus and Perseus are famous among astronomers. These star-forming regions are just 400 and 1,000 light-years from Earth, respectively, offering a glimpse of how stars come to be in the galaxy. Now we know a bit more about the origin of these clouds …

(Photo: Tyler van der Hoeven/Unsplash)Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak is starting a space company that appears to be dedicated to cleaning up space debris. In a vague tweet from Sunday, Wozniak said he was starting a private space company “unlike the others” and linked to a YouTube video posted under a …

The outer solar system is littered with big chunks of rock and ice, but rarely do their orbits bring them close enough to Earth for us to get a good look. And then there’s 2014 UN271, an approaching object that astronomers believe to be a huge comet on a million-year …

Hurricanes in the Earth’s low atmosphere are well known; however, disturbances resembling hurricanes had never before been detected in the upper atmosphere. An artist’s impression of a space hurricane. Image credit: Qing-He Zhang, Shandong University. “Until now, it was uncertain that space plasma hurricanes even existed, so to prove this …

  SpaceX already has a number of lucrative contracts with NASA thanks to its reusable Falcon 9 rocket, not least of which is the recently realized Commercial Crew Program. NASA isn’t just using SpaceX for crewed flights, though. The agency has just awarded SpaceX another cargo contract, this one to …

  SpaceX made history recently when it launched a record 143 satellites on a single rocket. Among the plethora of spacecraft were ten new Starlink internet satellites. According to CEO Elon Musk, these are the first nodes in SpaceX’s network that have fully operational laser communication systems, allowing the satellites …

Using the Atmosphere-Space Interactions Monitor (ASIM) observatory on the International Space Station (ISS), researchers have observed five intense blue flashes, one of which initiated a pulsating blue jet into the stratosphere, over the Pacific Ocean, close to the island of Nauru. Blue jet: (a) the cloud-top altitude of the storm …

  NASA has a wealth of space rocks, known more properly as astromaterials. Some of them came directly from the surface of the moon during the Apollo era, and others were discovered after falling to Earth in Antarctica. Now, you can check out NASA’s collection in extreme detail using the …