Space

Back in the 1930s, when physicist and engineer Karl Jansky aimed his radio antenna at the heart of our galaxy, he picked up a steady stream of radio waves. Upon digging into the data, scientists figured out that these radio waves were coming from something way farther out in…

NASA showed us last year that we can actually redirect an asteroid by slamming a spacecraft into it. But in case that doesn’t do the trick, we’ve got another plan: let’s just nuke it. After NASA’s DART mission successfully shifted an asteroid moonlet…

Many of us would be a huge fan of Deep Impact and Armageddon. Those movies were awesome, packed with action, and, of course, featured an asteroid heading straight for Earth. What’s not to love? Both flicks explored the ways humanity could dodge a collision, but…

Black holes have such intense gravitational pull that nothing can break free. Is there any way we could tap into the colossal power of black holes for energy? In a fresh study, scientists suggest two ways we could potentially use black holes for energy in the future. They…

There’s this new study suggesting that we should get ready for meeting aliens, and it looks into what might happen socially if that actually occurs. So, how things go down during our first encounter with aliens is a big deal. This paper is saying that it could be…

Telescopes have really evolved in just over four centuries! Back in 1608, Hans Lippershey, a Dutch guy who supposedly had nearsightedness, stumbled upon the magnifying abilities of lenses when experimenting with them. Fast forward to today, and we’ve got a bunch of…

After years of studying on the International Space Station (ISS) and other spacecraft circling Low Earth Orbit (LEO), it’s clear that spending a long time in microgravity isn’t great for the human body. We’ve seen things like muscle shrinkage, weaker bones…

Companies and the military keep an eye on around 170 million bits of space junk circling the Earth. However, their ability to spot these objects is restricted to those larger than a softball. Radar or optical systems can only track such sizable chunks, which make up less…

The Milky Way is like a twisty, maybe even fancy spiral galaxy, but it’s hard to say for sure from where we’re looking. What we do know is that there aren’t a lot of galaxies shaped like a disk in our neck of the cosmic neighborhood known as the…

Stars are kind of stuck to their galaxies because of gravity and go along with the flow of their surroundings. But every now and then, something messes up this connection. Like, if a star gets too cozy with a supermassive black hole, the black hole might kick it out into…

Checking out faraway objects isn’t a walk in the park, all thanks to our planet’s dense and hazy atmosphere. When light travels through the upper layers of our atmosphere, it gets bent and messed up, making it a real challenge to spot things that are really far…

Getting more details is great, especially for space projects funded by the public. It’s cool when a NASA engineer takes a break from their busy schedule to give us an update on the beloved Mars helicopter, Ingenuity. The little chopper has been going through a tough…

On February 15, 2013, a massive meteor, about the size of a semitrailer, zoomed in from the direction of the rising sun and burst into a fiery explosion above the city of Chelyabinsk, Russia. For a hot minute, that meteor lit up even more than the sun and blew up with a…