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When you take a look at the stars in the night sky, they generally appear the same regardless of time. Only a small number of stars ever appear to change on human timescales, as most stars burn through their fuel very stably, with almost no variation in their continuous brightness. The few stars that do appear to change are either intrinsically variable, members of multi-star systems, or go through an enormous evolutionary change. When very massive stars get close to the end of their lives, they start varying by tremendous amounts, and do so with significant irregularity. At a critical...

This illustration depicts the Sun-like star Kepler 51 and three giant planets that NASA's Kepler space telescope discovered in 2012–2014. These planets are all roughly the size of Jupiter but a tiny fraction of its mass. This means the planets have an extraordinarily low density, more like that of Styrofoam rather than rock or water, based on new Hubble Space Telescope observations. The planets may have formed much farther from their star and migrated inward. Now their puffed-up hydrogen/helium atmospheres are bleeding off into space. Eventually, much smaller planets might be left behind. The background starfield is correctly plotted as...

Rising space power China on Monday attacked the newly created U.S. Space Force as a “direct threat to outer space peace and security." Foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang told reporters that China is “deeply concerned about it and resolutely opposed to it."

A modified Soyuz rocket delivered a top secret Russian military payload into orbit Monday from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in northern Russia, according to the country’s defense ministry. The mission lifted off from the Site 43 launch complex at Plesetsk at 1752 GMT (12:52 p.m. EST; 8:52 p.m. Moscow time) Monday. A Soyuz 2-1v rocket carried a Volga upper stage and the classified military satellite into space, and the Volga stage successfully delivered its payload into the targeted orbit, Russian officials said. The Russian Ministry of Defense said the spacecraft launched Monday will monitor the condition of other Russian satellites in...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K82CRHDT1wc

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has once again sounded the alarm on the environment, reportedly telling an audience in San Diego that all heavy industrial activity must be moved to space to save Earth. Bezos appeared at the San Diego Air & Space Museum on Saturday to be inducted into the International Air & Space Hall of Fame for his work on Blue Origin, the space flight company he founded in 2000. The Times of San Diego reported that Bezos addressed a crowd of about 600 invitees at the private event. “I believe that, one day, Earth will be zoned residential...

An international team of scientists at NASA have found sugar molecules on two different meteorites, the agency announced on Nov. 19. The new discovery adds to the growing list of biologically important compounds that have been found in meteorites and supports the theory that chemical reactions in asteroids can play an important role in creating and supporting life, the space agency said in a statement. Researchers said they discovered “ribose and other bio-essential sugars” in the extraterrestrial rock, adding that ribose is a “crucial component of RNA (ribonucleic acid)”—essential for the regulation and expression of genes. “In much of modern...

A test version of SpaceX’s next-generation rocket, Starship, partially burst apart during ground tests in Texas today, erupting plumes of gas and sending some pieces of hardware soaring into the sky. Live streams set up by local space enthusiasts captured the failure in real time this afternoon. The explosive result occurred while SpaceX was seemingly conducting some pressure tests with the vehicle at the company’s test site in Boca Chica, Texas. The local live streams showed the vehicle venting gas periodically throughout the day, indicating that testing was underway. Now, that timeline is almost certain to shift. After the explosion,...

"A study of 11 healthy astronauts onboard the International Space Station for six-month missions has revealed a new risk of long-term spaceflight..." (snip) ..."Reverse flow is really interesting, and we're uncertain if it harmful," Stenger said. "Reverse flow in the jugular vein could be completely harmless as the blood is simply leaving the head via one of the other venous pathways. However, reverse flow implies altered venous pressure dynamics...."

The Bordeaux wines will be stored on the ISS at 18 degrees Celsius for one year before being returned to earth and compared to a control sample that has been kept at the same temperature, NASA said in an explainer article. The name of the Château involved has not been released. It’s not the first time that wine has been sent to space. Château Lynch-Bages saw its 1975 vintage launched into space aboard NASA’s Discovery shuttle in 1985, returning to earth in 2015. The Bordeaux wines will be stored in a ‘Complex Microbiological System’ – or CommuBioS – according to...

Voyager 2 has entered the interstellar medium (ISM), the region of space outside the bubble-shaped boundary produced by wind streaming outward from the sun. Voyager 2, thus, becomes the second human-made object to journey out of our sun's influence, following Voyager 1's solar exit in 2012. [R]esearchers confirm Voyager 2's passage on Nov. 5, 2018, into the ISM by noting a definitive jump in plasma density detected by an Iowa-led plasma wave instrument on the spacecraft. The marked increase in plasma density is evidence of Voyager 2 journeying from the hot, lower-density plasma characteristic of the solar wind to the...

Things took a disastrous turn when India’s Chandrayaan-2 spacecraft attempted to land on the Moon on September 6. As it approached the Moon’s south pole, where it had planned to land in order to confirm the presence of water ice, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) lost contact with the machine. It was presumed the machine crashed into lunar surface but after more than a month of searching, there has been no evidence of Chandrayaan-2 found

A MYSTERIOUS supermassive black hole in a distant galaxy is spitting high energy particles after being fed by an object that has never been seen before. The baffling phenomenon has put existing theoretical models on their head, and astrophysicists are puzzled as to what is creating such a regular excretion of material from within the bowels of this supermassive black hole. According to the paper titled, 'Nine-hour X-ray quasi-periodic eruptions from a low-mass black hole galactic nucleus', the energy erupts from the black hole every nine hours and last for one hour and it's that precision which has baffled scientists.

A new study using data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope provides a rare glimpse of conditions on the surface of a rocky planet orbiting a star beyond the Sun... the planet's surface may resemble those of Earth's Moon or Mercury: The planet likely has little to no atmosphere and could be covered in the same cooled volcanic material found in the dark areas of the Moon's surface, called mare. Discovered in 2018 by NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Satellite Survey (TESS) mission, planet LHS 3844b is located 48.6 light-years from Earth and has a radius 1.3 times that of Earth. It orbits...

Stratolaunch said Friday that the company has “transitioned ownership” a year after the death of Paul Allen, the company’s billionaire founder who funded the construction of the world’s largest airplane for an airborne satellite launcher. The company offered few other details in a statement released to media Friday. It was the first official update on the status of Stratolaunch since its huge rocket carrier aircraft completed its first — and so far only — test flight in April. “Stratolaunch LLC has transitioned ownership and is continuing regular operations,” the company said in a statement. “Our near-term launch vehicle development strategy...

Alexei Leonov, a Soviet-era cosmonaut who was the first human to conduct a spacewalk in 1965, died Friday in Moscow aged 85, his assistant said. "He died today in Moscow at the Burdenko hospital after a long illness," Natalia Filimonova told AFP. The Russian space agency Roscosmos said it was saddened to announce the death of "cosmonaut No 11" who was twice decorated with the country's top honor, the Hero of the Soviet Union.

Even if you haven’t seen Star Wars, everyone knows about the Death Star. But how realistic is the idea of the Death Star, and how much energy would it really take power such a monstrosity? In the off chance that you’ve spent some time away from Earth over the last few decades and you don't know what a Death Star is, it is only the most powerful space station ever imagined and has the ability to blow up an entire planet. The Death Star is such a mind-bogglingly fantastic concept that it even gave rise to a half-serious petition to...

Billions of years ago, something slammed into the dark side of the moon and carved out a very, very large hole. Stretching 1,550 miles (2,500 kilometers) wide and 8 miles (13 km) deep, the South Pole-Aitken basin... For decades, researchers have suspected that the gargantuan basin was created by a head-on collision with a very large, very fast meteor. Such an impact would have ripped the moon's crust apart and scattered chunks of lunar mantle across the crater's surface, providing a rare glimpse at what the moon is really made of. ... Now, however... After analyzing the minerals in six...

A MYSTERIOUS object hurtling towards our Solar System may be an alien spacecraft. That's the shock claim made by one space scientist, who has exclusively revealed to The Sun that our incoming visitor could be piloted by hyper-intelligent beings. Last week, scientists in Germany announced they had spotted a distant object heading in our direction. Dubbed "C/2019 Q4", the high-speed body appears to be on a path originating from another star system that will see it fire past Mars in October. Despite numerous attempts to study C/2019, scientists remain clueless as to what it is. Many speculate the distant mass...

The moon is all the rage these days. China wants to send people there. So too does the United States and NASA. In fact, just about every country with a space program has some sort of lunar ambition that they hope will play out over the next few years. Now, there’s a new entrant in this new space race, a nonprofit organization called the Open Lunar Foundation. Based in San Francisco, it’s a group made up of tech executives and engineers—many of them with former ties to NASA—who have serious ambitions to create a lunar settlement. The driving ethos behind...