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Two Earth Mass Planets Orbiting Star GJ 100 Artist’s impression of two Earth-mass planets orbiting the star GJ 1002. Credit: Alejandro Suárez Mascareño and Inés Bonet (IAC) ************************************************************************** An international scientific team led by researchers at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) has discovered the presence of two planets with Earth-like masses in orbit around the star GJ 1002, a red dwarf not far from the Solar System. Both planets are in the habitability zone of the star “Nature seems bent on showing us that Earth-like planets are very common. With these two we now know 7 in planetary...

| Overview Searching for signs of life in the galaxy, identifying supernova outbursts, and finding evidence to support or refute modern physical theories are among the new astronomical observatory of x-rays’ objectives. The Square Kilometer Array Observatory’s (SKAO) construction has begun in its Australian and South African sites. The science and other stuff to know “It’s been a 30-year journey. The first 10 years were spent developing concepts and ideas. The second 10 were spent developing technology. And then the last Decade was spent on detailed design, securing the sites, getting governments to agree to set up a treaty organization,...

Genesis 1:1-10Apollo 8 Christmas Eve Broadcast - Genesis Reading (1968)Bill AndersWe are now approaching lunar sunrise, and for all the people back on Earth, the crew of Apollo 8 has a message that we would like to send to you.In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God...

To create some gravity, you could hollow a decent-sized asteroid out...and spin it up like a ring-station, using centrifugal force to create that 0.3g. Then, you could build your city entirely within the spinning asteroid; sure, it'd be dark in there, but the rock would protect people from harmful space radiation. That might have a chance of working if the asteroid was made of solid rock with high tensile strength throughout. The team looked into the composition of our local "flying mountains" and found that most are more or less giant piles of rubble, collections of big and small rocks...

My parents were both physicists, specializing in astronomy. My mother went to MIT and Harvard, my father Harvard.Neither came from a privileged background. My mother (RIP) grew up the child of a single mother and had a deadbeat dad whom I never met. She hailed from Henryetta, OK, a town that even then was dying.My father came from a lower-middle class family. He is ethnically Jewish, and was enrolled at Harvard despite quotas that at the time limited the number of Jews who could be admitted (the same is done to Asians today).They retired as privileged, well-regarded scientists, financially secure....

Archeologists say they have traced the origins of the first Christmas to be celebrated on 25 December, 300 years before the birth of Christ. The original event marked the consecration of the ancient world's largest sun god statue, the 34m tall, 200 ton Colossus of Rhodes. It has long been known that 25 December was not the real date of Christ's birth and that the decision to turn it into Jesus's birthday was made by Constantine, the Roman Emperor, in the early 4th century AD. But experts believe the origins of that decision go back to 283 BC, when, in...

Explanation: This is what Saturn looks like from inside the rings. In 2017, for the first time, NASA directed the Cassini spacecraft to swoop between Saturn and its rings. During the dive, the robotic spacecraft took hundreds of images showing unprecedented detail for structures in Saturn's atmosphere. Looking back out, however, the spacecraft was also able to capture impressive vistas. In the featured image, taken a few hours before closest approach, Saturn's unusual northern hexagon is seen surrounding the North Pole. Saturn's B ring is the closest visible, while the dark Cassini Division separates B from the outer A. A...

Part of the adventure in luring your friends out to the high desert terrain in Northern California, where a valley floor spills from the northern backside of Mount Shasta, is that precious moment when they look at you as though you’ve led them into danger. Having discovered Pluto’s Cave from a map, I was prepared for some sagebrush whacking. What I wasn’t prepared for was that reaching the trailhead required navigating a maze of dusty roads. The cave is considered an easy hike — no serious spelunking experience necessary — and located less than 20 minutes from Interstate 5. Pluto’s...

For most of human history, the disasters wrought by nature were utterly unpredictable, their causes wholly unknown. They were merely a random act of God that could lay waste to whole cities without warning. On the morning of May 20, 1202, thousands of people across an enormous swath of the Earth experienced such destruction.The Forgotten 1202 earthquakeThe History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered1.13M subscribers | 79,737 views | December 12, 2022

An interstellar row has broken out between the Royal Astronomical Society and Nasa over claims a former boss purged gay staff. The James Webb space telescope – the most powerful observatory ever built – was named in honour of the man who ran the space agency in the 1960s. But the 202-year-old society has ordered its 4,000 members to refrain from using the telescope's full title following claims that Mr Webb was a homophobe who oversaw a purge of gay employees.

[snip] On September 3, 1859 the Memphis Tennessee Daily Appeal noted a most startling event. "On Thursday night last, about 12 o clock, the heavens were suddenly lit up as with a half dozen moons." The glow was so remarkable that people assumed it must be coming from a massive fire, and the paper reported that city fire bells were rung. But, the paper writes "When the truth revealed itself, it appeared that old nature had only lit up its own chandelier." The lights were the aurora borealis, although you can hardly fault people from the American South for not...

It could be the end of the red dusty line for NASA's InSight lander, which has fallen silent after four years on Mars. The lander's power levels have been dwindling for months because of all the dust coating its solar panels. Ground controllers at California's Jet Propulsion Laboratory knew the end was near, but NASA reported that InSight unexpectedly didn't respond to communications from Earth on Sunday. "It's assumed InSight may have reached the end of its operations," NASA said late Monday, adding that its last communication was Thursday. "It's unknown what prompted the change in its energy." Just last...

Carina Nebula (NGC 3324) captured by Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) (NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI) The powerful James Webb Space Telescope is a mighty technological tool. Astrophysicists first conceived it over 20 years ago, and after many twists and turns, it was launched on December 25, 2021. Now it's in a halo orbit at the Sun-Earth L2 point, where it will hopefully continue operating for 20 years. It's only been a few months since its first images were released, and it's already making progress in answering some of the Universe's most compelling questions. In a newly-released image, the JWST peered deep inside massive clouds...

A team of physicists affiliated with several institutions in the U.S. has collaborated on a paper that discusses the possibility of using the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) to search for evidence of aliens piloting huge spacecraft around the Milky Way. They group has posted their paper on the arXiv preprint server. In this new effort, the researchers note that science has advanced to the point that gravity waves can be detected by technology such as LIGO. They further suggest that it is not beyond the realm of possibility that aliens piloting spacecraft could leave gravity waves in their...

A mysterious shock wave in a gust of solar wind has sent a barrage of high-speed material smashing into Earth’s magnetic field, opening up a crack in the magnetosphere. The barrage of plasma could lead to a geomagnetic storm today (Dec. 19), according to spaceweather.com. The shockwave’s origins aren’t exactly known, but scientists think it could have come from a coronal mass ejection launched by the sunspot AR3165, a fizzing region on the sun’s surface that released a flurry of at least eight solar flares on Dec. 14, causing a brief radio blackout over the Atlantic Ocean. Sunspots are areas...

For decades, astronomers assumed that Mars was geodynamically dead — a planet without rumbling earthquakes and erupting volcanoes. Though remnants of towering volcanoes exist on the surface of the Red Planet today, these colossal structures have been dormant for millions of years. With little to no heat firing the planet's engine, scientists reasoned, Mars became dormant long ago. However, over the last five years, this assumption has been proven wrong. NASA's InSight mission has detected quakes and even evidence of recent volcanism around one Martian region, known as Elysium Planitia. And now, they think they know why this activity is...

Sent primarily to investigate the origin and evolution of Jupiter, Juno has been able to take in bonus observations of the planet's four major moons - Callisto, Ganymede, Europa and now Io. It performed its close flyby of Ganymede in 2021, and of Europa earlier this year. These passes produced some novel insights from Juno's microwave radiometer. Intended to look deep into the clouds of Jupiter, this instrument has also been able to see down through the ice layers of Ganymede and Europa for tens of kilometres. These two moons are of particular interest because they're both thought to hide...

The location of the most distant galaxy ever detected. (NASA, ESA, CSA, M. Zamani/ESA/Webb) Light that has traveled for over 13.4 billion years to reach our neighborhood of space has been confirmed as originating from the earliest, most distant galaxy detected yet. That places the most distant of these four very young objects at the very dawn of the Universe, just a short time after the Big Bang – a time period when the Universe was still foggy and bleary and the first rays of light were penetrating the darkness. So detailed are the JWST's long spectroscopic observations that researchers...

As a spacewalk was being planned to move a radiator onto a new module on the space station a cooling system on the Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft was seen leaking into space. This resulted in the space walk being cancelled and the crew investigating this problem while trying to limit effects on the station's scientific experiments.Will Leaking Russian Spaceship Leave The Crew Stranded In Space?Scott Manley | 1.53M subscribers | 196,864 views | December 15, 2022

In December 2021, a massive blast of energy hit the Earth’s atmosphere. Its source was a gamma-ray burst – one of the most powerful explosions in the universe – but not just any gamma ray burst. One scientist said at the time that the event – named GRB 211211A – “looks unlike anything else we have seen before The event was detected in December 2021 by NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory and the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. The gamma-ray burst was significantly longer than average, which might normally suggest it had been produced by the collapse of a massive star...