An unparalleled image from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory is giving an international team of astronomers the best look yet at the growth of black holes over billions of years beginning soon after the Big Bang.
Expedition 50 Commander Shane Kimbrough and Flight Engineer Thomas Pesquet concluded their spacewalk at 12:20 p.m. EST.
On January 14, 2017, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 successfully delivered 10 satellites to low-Earth orbit for Iridium, a global leader in mobile voice and data satellite communications.
Starving stars are more common than intelligent life
A newly proposed technique could make it possible to search for life on alien planets much sooner than scientists had expected.
Searching for planets around other stars is a tricky business. They’re so small and faint that it’s hard to spot them. But a possible planet in a nearby stellar system may be betraying its presence in a unique way: by a shadow that is sweeping across the face of a vast pancake-shaped gas-and-dust disk surrounding a young star.
Every few thousand years, an unlucky star wanders too close to the black hole at the center of the Milky Way. The black hole’s powerful gravity rips the star apart, sending a long streamer of gas whipping outward.
Sunlight truly has come to Saturn’s north pole. The whole northern region is bathed in sunlight in this view from late 2016, feeble though the light may be at Saturn’s distant domain in the solar system.
A team of astronomers is making a bold prediction: In 2022, give or take a year, a pair of stars will merge and explode, becoming one of the brightest objects in the sky for a short period.
MARS has a real water shortage. It seems we have either misunderstood what its early years were like – or vast amounts of water are hiding beneath its surface.
