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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...

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...

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...

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....

Using the Hubble Space Telescope astronomers have discovered a nearby galaxy that apparently has little or no evidence of dark matter. The unique galaxy, called NGC 1052-DF2, contains at most 1/400th the amount of dark matter that astronomers had expected. The galaxy is as large as our Milky Way, but it had escaped attention because it contains only 1/200th the number of stars.

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...

THE REMAINS of an out-of-control Chinese space station are expected to light up the sky with “fireballs” before crashing down to Earth within days. China’s defunct space station, named Tiangong-1 or “heavenly place”, is expected to fall to Earth between March 30 and April 2, latest estimates suggest. Most of the eight-tonne space probe, launched in 2011, should “burn up” in the atmosphere before crash landing, Chinese space officials say. China’s space agency, CNSA, have never fully explained why Tiangong-1 "ceased functioning" on March 16 after reaching its "final phase of life". According to space experts, the odds of being...

In the stew of false information and conspiracy theories that swirls online, perhaps no idea is as flummoxing as the belief in a flat Earth. Flat-Earthers believe that the Earth is a flat disc ringed by an ice wall. All those elegant models of a round Earth that perfectly explain seasons, eclipses, sunrises and sunsets? Lies and cover-ups, they say. Pictures of the round Earth from space? Government conspiracies. The fact that you can see ships disappearing hull-first over the curve of the horizon with your own eyes? Well, flat-Earthers claim to see something different. It's been a big publicity...

Our solar system's first known interstellar visitor is likely even more alien than previously imagined, a new study suggests. The mysterious, needle-shaped object 'Oumuamua, which was spotted zooming through Earth's neighborhood last October, probably originated in a two-star system, according to the study. 'Oumuamua means "scout" in Hawaiian; the object was discovered by researchers using the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS), at Haleakala Observatory on the island of Maui. ... "It's really odd that the first object we would see from outside our system would be an asteroid, because a comet would be a lot easier to...

A new scenario seeking to explain how Mars’ putative oceans came and went over the last 4 billion years implies that the oceans formed several hundred million years earlier and were not as deep as once thought. The early ocean known as Arabia (left, blue) would have looked like this when it formed 4 billion years ago on Mars, while the Deuteronilus ocean, about 3.6 billion years old, had a smaller shoreline. Both coexisted with the massive volcanic province Tharsis, located on the unseen side of the planet, which may have helped support the existence of liquid water. The water...

In such a scenario, scientists expect that about a fifth of the Moon's material would have come from Earth and the rest from the impacting body. The Moon, our planet's constant companion for some 4.5 billion years, may have been forged by a rash of smaller bodies smashing into an embryonic Earth, researchers have revealed. A bombardment birth would explain a major inconsistency in the prevailing hypothesis that the Moon splintered off in a single, giant impact between Earth and a Mars-sized celestial body. In such a scenario, scientists expect that about a fifth of the Moon's material would have...

Bennu has a shape that looks a bit like a spinning top. It is roughly 500 meters (1,640 feet) in diameter and orbits the sun once every 1.2 years, or 436.604 days. Every six years or so, it comes very close to Earth — about 0.002 AU, according to the University of Arizona. (... well within the orbit of Earth's moon.) Bennu is part of a small class of carbonaceous (dark) asteroids that likely have primitive materials in them. Called a B-type class, Bennu and other asteroids like it have materials such as volatiles (compounds with a low boiling point),...

Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk told an audience at South by Southwest that his timeline for sending a space vehicle to Mars could mark its first milestone early next year. The privately-funded venture, announced in September 2017, aims to send a cargo mission to the Red Planet by 2022. SpaceX's ultimate objective is to plant the seeds to put a human colony on Mars. Musk held a surprise question and answer session at the annual technology and culture festival in Austin, Texas on Sunday. The billionaire told attendees that "we are building the first Mars, or interplanetary ship, and...

Although planets surround stars in the galaxy, how they form remains a subject of debate. Despite the wealth of worlds in our own solar system, scientists still aren't certain how planets are built. Currently, two theories are duking it out for the role of champion. The first and most widely accepted, core accretion, works well with the formation of the terrestrial planets but has problems with giant planets such as Uranus. The second, the disk instability method, may account for the creation of giant planets. "What separates the ice giants from the gas giants is their formation history: during...

Up for Grabs In Science, When 'Anything Goes,' Everything Goesby Denyse O'Leary Family values activist Austin Ruse's new book, Fake Science: Exposing the Left's Skewed Statistics, Fuzzy Facts, and Dodgy Data (Regnery, 2017), offers a look at a world growing increasingly hostile to evidence-based reasoning. We have not discovered better reasoning methods; rather, many people seem to have decided that reasoning is not relevant to our life together, and perhaps not relevant to the life of the mind generally. Ruse begins his book with a note about polls. Opinion pollsters claim that their work is a scientific enterprise. But in...

Astronomers have detected a signal from the first stars as they appeared and illuminated the universe, in observations that have been hailed as “revolutionary”.

In a clean room inside a clean room at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, a petite telescope is perched on a stand for a final series of checkouts prior to launch. The extra fastidiousness is because the observatory’s four cameras will fly without protective covers—one of several simplifying design decisions made to help ensure the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, will meet its goal of measuring the masses of at least 50 small, rocky and potentially Earth-like worlds as part of the first all-sky, exoplanet survey. TESS was proposed even before NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler space telescope, launched in 2009, demonstrated...

Physicists have insisted for a long time that black holes are impenetrable ciphers. Whatever goes in is lost, impossible to study or meaningfully understand. Some small amount of matter and energy might escape a black hole in the form of "Hawking radiation," but anything still inside the black hole is functionally disappeared from the physical universe. The idea is a basic premise of modern physics: If something falls into a black hole, it can't be contacted, it's future can't be predicted. No observer could possibly survive traveling into the dark space, not even long enough to glance around and notice...

(The Hubble Space Telescope captured this image of ancient and brilliant quasar 3C 273, which resides in a giant elliptical galaxy in the constellation of Virgo. Its light has taken some 2.5 billion years to reach us. Despite this great distance, it is still one of the closest quasars to our home. It was the first quasar ever to be identified, and was discovered in the early 1960s by astronomer Allan Sandage.) Shining so brightly that they eclipse the ancient galaxies that contain them, quasars are distant objects powered by black holes a billion times as massive as our...