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Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX, posted a picture Sunday of what what he described as the “main body tool” for his company’s BFR interplanetary spaceship. BFR—which reportedly stands for “Big F---ing Rocket,” will be designed to withstand planetary entry on Earth, "Mars and beyond,” TechCrunch reported. Space.com reported that BFR's “chief aim” is to make colonizing Mars economically feasible. "We're actually building that ship right now," he said in an interview last month. "I think we'll probably be able to do short flights, short sort of up-and-down flights, probably sometime in the first half of next year." Shortly...

When the Hubble Space Telescope took a photo of distant galaxy cluster SDSS J0146-0929, it was able to capture an immensely massive blanket of hundreds of galaxies caught in each other's gravitational pulls. In the photo, they look no more than inconsequential space dust: tiny, motionless, and remote. But in fact, the combined mass of these galaxies is so great that it causes a distortion in the fabric of space and time. That is represented by a glowing ring in the center of the image, which is actually a phenomenon called gravitational lensing. The circle of light, called the...

Only 66 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds in the U.S. are confident that the world is round, according to a new national survey. The findings don't necessarily indicate an epidemic of flat-Earthism, as only 4 percent of the 18- to 24-year-old age group said they actually believe the world is flat. Rather, there seem to be a relatively large number in this age group who are willing to entertain doubts: 9 percent said they had always believed the world was round but were recently having doubts, 5 percent said they had always believed the world was flat but were becoming...

Since most of us do not have as a fertile imagination as our ancestors in visualizing people, animals, mythological beasts or even inanimate objects among the stars, we tend to fall back on more familiar figures, such as a great square, a backwards question mark, a kite, and so on. The sky abounds in this particular shape.... In addition to two constellations that are officially recognized as triangles (Triangulum and Triangulum Australe, the Southern Triangle), there are triangles that represent the hindquarters of two animals, the Big Dog (Canis Major) and the Lion (Leo). ... Probably the most famous celestial...

A combination of data-churning telescopes and proprietary algorithms has led to a slate of opaque research that has some astronomers concerned. When astronomer Kai Polsterer’s laptop was stolen, the thieves made off with more than hardware. The laptop contained Polsterer’s only copy of a collection of thousands of stars and galaxies, a sample that a computer algorithm had randomly selected from a data set consisting of millions of celestial objects. Because Polsterer could not re-create what the algorithm had done, he could not exactly reproduce his data set for a work-in-progress journal article. And without a data set, nobody could...

The discovery of NGC 1052-DF2 has led scientists on the quest for more dark matter-deficient galaxies. What really makes up the rare and mysterious DF2 galaxy? Dark matter supposedly composes 27 percent of the cosmos, but the newly discovered DF2 galaxy, has none of it. New Galaxy In TownScientists researching ultra-diffuse galaxies have spotted a large, sparse galaxy in the northern constellation of Cetus. The mysterious galaxy is almost as big as the Milky Way but has only 1 percent of its stars. The galaxy is almost empty except for densely clustered stars moving very slow at an estimate of...

Amid efforts to find alien life, scientists have not yet confirmed the existence of an extraterrestrial civilization. Findings of a new study suggest this has something do with the element phosphorus lacking in the cosmos. Life-Giving PhosphorusPhosphorus is the 11th most common element on Earth, and it is fundamental to all living things. Phosphorus is one of only six chemical elements on our planet that organisms depend on. "[Phosphorus] helps form the backbone of the long chains of nucleotides that create RNA and DNA; it is part of the phospholipids in cell membranes; and is a building block of the...

Hundreds of billions of stars make up the barred spiral galaxy that we call home. The Milky Way’s 100,000 light-year diameter houses stars of different masses, luminosities, and ages, with new stars constantly being added to the mix. Star formation isn’t showing signs of slowing down, and this includes births at the outer edges of the galaxy. Could these young stars forming near the galactic edge be expanding the size of the Milky Way? A team of researchers, led by Ph.D. candidate Cristina Martínez-Lombilla of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias in Spain, presented research supporting this idea at the...

Anticipated but never before seen, the existence of tens of thousands of these dark objects at the galactic center could have far-reaching implications for astrophysics An artist's rendering of the Milky Way's core, with a supermassive black hole at its center. Scientists have discovered what appear to be twelve smaller black holes orbiting our galaxy's central giant. Each is thought to actually be a binary system composed of a black hole and a low-mass star. Gas siphoned from the star glows in x-rays as it falls into the black holes, allowing them to be seen. Credit: Columbia University For the...

There are stars too faint to see in the night sky just a few light years away, yet a chance cosmic event gave us a glimpse of a star that would have otherwise been completely invisible due to its immense distance from Earth—a whopping 9 billion light-years away. A paper today in Nature Astronomy reports the discovery of the star, called MACS J1149 Lensed Star 1, or Icarus informally. Finding such a distant star is normally a tall order, but a larger object happened to pass in front of its home galaxy. When a large object passes in front of...

In 2016, NASA sequenced DNA in space for the first time, but alien life, we may soon discover, may be vastly different on other planets and moons, particularly as we expand our efforts to explore ocean worlds with our solar system and beyond. “Most strategies for life detection rely upon finding features known to be associated with Earth's life, such as particular classes of molecules,” the researchers wrote. DNA and RNA are the building blocks of life on Earth, but the molecules of life might differ substantially on another planet. A new paper by scientists at Georgetown University, published online...

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Twitter Email Print Save Leo the Lion is one of the more recognizable constellations in the April sky. It is also a great place to point a telescope and try your hand at deep sky observing. The “deep sky” is what astronomers call the realm beyond our solar system; it is populated with galaxies, nebulae and star clusters in abundance. As winter turns to spring, our evening sky turns away from the plane of the Milky Way. Our view is directed into deep space where we find external galaxies unhindered by the obscuring gas and dust of our own galaxy....

A full Blue Moon rises into the evening sky tonight (March 31). This will be the second and final Blue Moon of 2018, so don't miss it!

Op-ed | Moon Direct: How to build a moonbase in four yearsby Robert Zubrin — March 30, 2018SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket, which made its debut Feb. 6, is the foundation of author Robert Zubrin’s “Moon Direct” plan for affordably returning humans to the moon within four years. Credit: SpaceX This op-ed originally appeared in the March 26, 2018 issue of SpaceNews magazine.The recent amazing success of the Falcon Heavy launch offers America an unprecedented opportunity to break the stagnation that has afflicted its human spaceflight program for decades. In short, the moon is now within reach.Here’s how the mission plan...

ometime over the next few weeks the small Chinese space station Tiangong-1 will re-enter Earth's atmosphere and (mostly) burn up. The big questions are where and when. Unfortunately, because we don't know when, we can’t know where. The most likely date is around April 1, but the timing is uncertain — and because of that, we don't know where it will come down. We also don't know how much of it will make it to the ground, but the better news is that the majority of it will burn up. It's unlikely very much will survive to make it down....

Here's a problem: The universe acts like it's a lot more massive than it looks. Take galaxies, those giant, spinning masses of stars. The laws of motion and gravity tell us how fast these objects should turn given their bulk. But observations through telescopes show them spinning way faster than we'd expect, as if they were actually much more massive than the stars we can see indicate. Astrophysicists have come up with two main solutions to this problem. Either there's a lot of mass out there in the universe that we can't detect directly, mass scientists call dark matter, or there's no...

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope currently is undergoing final integration and test phases that will require more time to ensure a successful mission. After an independent assessment of remaining tasks for the highly complex space observatory, Webb’s previously revised 2019 launch window now is targeted for approximately May 2020. “Webb is the highest priority project for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate, and the largest international space science project in U.S. history. All the observatory’s flight hardware is now complete, however, the issues brought to light with the spacecraft element are prompting us to take the necessary steps to refocus our...

Gravitational waves have opened up new ways to test the properties of black holes — and Einstein’s theory of gravity along with them.We all dream the same dream, here in theoretical physics. We dream of the day when one of our equations will be plotted against data and fit spot on. It’s rare for this dream to come true. Even if it does, some don’t live to see it. Take, for example, Albert Einstein, who passed away in 1955, 60 years before his equations’ most stunning consequence was confirmed: Space-time has periodic ripples — gravitational waves — that can carry...

The Difficult Birth of the "Many Worlds" Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics Hugh Everett, creator of this radical idea during a drunken debate more than 60 years ago, died before he could see his theory gain widespread popularity   By Adam Becker on March 21, 2018 Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Reddit Email Print Share via Google+Stumble Upon Credit: Garik Barseghyan Pixabay Over several rounds of sherry late one night in the fall of 1955, the Danish physicist Aage Petersen debated the mysteries at the heart of quantum physics with two graduate students, Charles Misner and Hugh Everett, at Princeton University. Petersen was defending the...