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Our Moon's appearance changes nightly. As the Moon orbits the Earth, the half illuminated by the Sun first becomes increasingly visible, then decreasingly visible. The featured video animates images taken by NASA's Moon-orbiting Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter to show all 12 lunations that appear this year, 2018. A single lunation describes one full cycle of our Moon, including all of its phases. A full lunation takes about 29.5 days, just under a month (moon-th). As each lunation progresses, sunlight reflects from the Moon at different angles, and so illuminates different features differently. During all of this, of course, the Moon always...

Central Michigan University geology professor Mona Sirbescu gets asked all the time if rocks people possess are meteorites, valuable rocks from space. "For 18 years, the answer has been categorically 'no'... But this latest rock was the real thing..." "I could tell right away that this was something special," she said of the 22-plus pound meteorite, described as the sixth-largest recorded find in Michigan and worth potentially $100,000. "It's the most valuable specimen I have ever held in my life, monetarily and scientifically," she added. David Mazurek says he took his doorstop to the university for examination in January, after...

A 22-pound rock that has been propping open a door in Michigan for decades turns out to be a meteorite valued at $100,000, according to Central Michigan University. Mona Sirbescu, a CMU geology professor, gets asked all the time by people to examine the rocks they bring her — but none ever turn out to be an official space rock. “For 18 years, the answer has been categorically ‘no’ — meteor wrongs, not meteorites,” Sibescu said in a statement from CMU on Thursday. But that all changed when she was asked to examine an oddly shaped large rock that a...

A Michigan man recently discovered that the rock he had been using as a doorstop for years was actually a meteorite valued at at least $100,000. ..."For 18 years, the answer has been categorically 'no' — meteor wrongs, not meteorites," Sirbescu said jokingly in a CMU statement. It wasn't until this year that her answer was finally changed to a yes. ...After purchasing the land, the man put the rock to good use — a trusty doorstep like it had been for most of its Earth life. That's how it landed with Sirbescu, who then took the meteorite to one...

Japan's Hayabusa2 probe, which has been circling the 3,000-foot-wide (900 meters) asteroid Ryugu since late June, deployed two little "rovers" called MINERVA-II1A and MINERVA-II1B at 12:05 a.m. EDT (0405 GMT) today (Sept. 21). The event occurred when the mother ship was about 180 feet (55 meters) above Ryugu's pockmarked, boulder-strewn surface, mission team members said. "The separation of MINERVA-II1 has been confirmed! The state of the spacecraft is normal," JAXA officials announced via Twitter just after the rovers deployed. That confirmation came after an apparently tense descent for Hayabusa2 flight controllers. "In the control room, you can hear the sound...

The rovers are part of the MINERVA-II1 program, and are designed to hop along the asteroid's surface, taking photographs and gathering data. In fact, one of the initial images sent home by the hoppers is awfully blurry, since the robot snapped it while still on the go. In order to complete the deployment, the main spacecraft of the Hayabusa2 mission lowered itself carefully down toward the surface until it was just 120 feet (55 meters) up. After the rovers were on their way, the spacecraft raised itself back up to its typical altitude of about 12.5 miles above the asteroid's...

TOKYO (AP) — A German-French observation device safely landed on an asteroid on Wednesday after a Japanese spacecraft released it as part of a research effort that could find clues about the origin of the solar system, Japanese space officials said. The Japan Space Exploration Agency said the Mobile Asteroid Surface Scout, or MASCOT, was released from the unmanned spacecraft Hayabusa2 and successfully landed on the asteroid Ryugu. The spacecraft went as close as about 50 meters (160 feet) to the asteroid’s surface to release the box-shaped lander.

Astronomers have a problem on their hands: How can you make planets if you don’t have enough of the building blocks? Stars are born from colossal clouds of gas and dust and, in their earliest stages, are surrounded by a thin disk of material. Dust grains within this halo collide, sometimes sticking together. The clumps build up into planetary cores, which are big enough to gravitationally attract additional dust and gas, eventually forming planets. But many details about this process remain unknown, such as just how quickly planets arise from the disk, and how efficient they are in capturing material....

A glob of material the size of Earth is getting sucked into a black hole at nearly one-third the speed of light, a new study reports. The speed of light in a vacuum is 186,282 miles (299,792 kilometers) per second, and, according to Einstein's theory of special relativity, that's the top speed for anything traveling in our universe. So, something zipping at a third the speed of light is moving nearly 56,000 miles (90,000 km) per second — fast enough to circle Earth twice in that brief time. The newly observed infall event occurred in the galaxy PG211+143, which is...

All disk galaxies rotate once every billion years By Jake Parks  |  Published: Tuesday, March 13, 2018 Grand spiral galaxy (NGC 1232). FORS/8.2-meter VLT Antu/ESO In a study published March 9 in The Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, astronomers announced the discovery that all disk galaxies rotate about once every billion years, no matter their size or mass. “It’s not Swiss watch precision,” said Gerhardt Meurer, an astronomer from the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), in a press release. “But regardless of whether a galaxy is very big or very small, if you could sit on...

Scientists have uncovered the truth about a mysterious space rock called Oumuamua which has been hurtling through Earth’s solar system and was spotted last year.A group of acclaimed astronomers, including members from NASA, the European Space Agency and the German Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, released a report this week on the origins of the cigar-shaped asteroid which was first observed in October 2017. The name Oumuamua is Hawaiian for “messenger from afar arriving first” and was named by the site who first spotted it. According to the report, “a fast moving object on an unbound orbit was discovered close...

Teaming up to explore the galaxy with an AI assist. First light for TESS. This is the ifrst science image taken by NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS. NASA/MIT/TESS ==================================================================== The researchers at NASA’s Frontier Development Lab (FDL) in Mountain View California just spent the summer working on out-of-this-world problems. They came from all over the globe and all different disciplines; computer science engineers, planetary scientists, even a particle physicist. For eight weeks they dug through data and maps, created worlds and atmospheres, sorted them, and tested their computer algorithms against the simulations. Their final products are still rough,...

A 'death comet' will pass earth November 11 about 24million miles away It last showed itself on Halloween 2015 about 302,000 miles away from earth The comet has a human skull face and has been dubbed the Halloween asteroid The comet's next closest visit will occur on November 1, 2088 A 'death comet' will be zipping passed earth just after Halloween this year. The asteroid with a skull-like face will make its second trip near earth in three years after flying a worrisome 302,000 miles from our planet on October 31, 2015. This year, the comet will be a much...

Hey, I'm looking for some amature astronomy / astrophotography hobbyists that can give me hints, links and recommendations to get started.and even used eqipment that may fit in with what I'm going to do. 1. I'm handicapped so my mobility is restricted I'll startiing in my driveway with pretty high light polutiing focusing on objects off in our solor system. Sun, moon, Jup, mar, saturn, uran, Merc venusm pluto, Moons of Jupiter, planets transiting the Sun and if they are resolvable, some of the bigger asteroids. 2. I would like take some time delayed photographs just for practice for upgrades...

Don't sleep on NASA's New Horizons spacecraft. The history-making probe, which famously zoomed past Pluto in July 2015, is closing in on its next flyby target, a frigid chunk of ice and rock about 4 billion miles (6.4 billion kilometers) from Earth dubbed Ultima Thule.  New Horizons is now just 80 million miles (130 million km) from Ultima Thule, mission members said Wednesday (Sept. 19). That's less than the distance from Earth to the sun (about 93 million miles). [Destination Pluto: NASA's New Horizons Mission in Pictures]  The spacecraft has already begun photographing Ultima Thule for navigation purposes and remains...

SDSS J1050+0017, also known as ClG J1050+0017, is approximately 6 billion light-years away from Earth. The gigantic mass of this galaxy cluster creates the fascinating phenomenon of strong gravitational lensing.SDSS J1050+0017’s gravity bends light coming from behind it in a similar way to how the base of a wine glass bends light.The effects of this lensing can be clearly seen as curved streaks forming a circular shape around the center of the Hubble image.Astronomers can use these distorted galaxies to calculate the mass of the cluster — including the mass of the dark matter within it — and to peer...

Miguel Claro is a professional photographer, author and science communicator based in Lisbon, Portugal, who creates spectacular images of the night sky. As a European Southern Observatory photo ambassador, a member of The World At Night and the official astrophotographer of the Dark Sky Alqueva Reserve, he specializes in astronomical skyscapes that connect Earth and the night sky. Join him here as he takes us through his photograph "An Eclipsed Moon with Mars, Milky Way with Saturn, and a Satellite near Jupiter." Captured 15 minutes after the end of totality during the longest total lunar eclipse of the century, this...

The suspense is over: Two tiny hopping robots have successfully landed on an asteroid called Ryugu — and they've even sent back some wild postcards from their new home. The tiny rovers are part of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Hayabusa2 asteroid sample-return mission. Engineers with the agency deployed the robots early Friday (Sept. 21), but JAXA waited until today (Sept. 22) to confirm the operation was successful and both rovers made the landing safely. The rovers are part of the MINERVA-II1 program, and are designed to hop along the asteroid's surface, taking photographs and gathering data. In fact, one of the...

Spacecraft and satellites could in future be launched into space without the need for fuel, thanks to a revolutionary new theory. Dr Mike McCulloch, from the University of Plymouth, first put forward the idea of quantised inertia (QI) – through which he believes light can be converted into thrust – in 2007. He has now received $1.3million from the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for a four-year study which aims to make the concept a reality. The QI theory predicts that objects can be pushed by differences in the intensity of so-called Unruh radiation in space, similar...

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has taken a detailed image of a spectacular part of the Coma cluster, a structure of over a thousand galaxies bound together by gravity. The Coma Cluster, also known as Abell 1656, lies in the northern constellation of Coma Berenices, about 300 million light-years away from Earth.Many of the galaxies in the cluster are ellipticals, as is NGC 4860, the brighter of the two galaxies dominating this Hubble image.However, the outskirts of the cluster also host younger spiral galaxies that proudly display their swirling arms.Again, this image shows a wonderful example of such a galaxy...