A Falcon 9 rocket lifts off to begin Starlink Mission 4-17. Credit: Stephen Clark/Spaceflight Now SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket from Kennedy Space Center at dawn on Friday with 53 Starlink internet satellites, ending a sleepless night of space operations just five hours after sending four astronauts back in a splash off the west … Read more
Much like YouTube turned a generation of watchers into creators, new advances in telescope technology are allowing amateur sky watchers to make real, meaningful contributions to science. Astrophotography isn’t easy. It requires an understanding of stellar coordinates, when different objects will be visible, the ability to stay up late, and patience. One firm, Unistellar, has … Read more
A massive solar flare erupted from the surface of the Sun earlier this week. The X-class flare is just the latest flare from the Sun that has caught NASA’s attention. This time, however, NASA managed to capture an image of the solar flare as it happened. It’s a stunning image, and it looks like it … Read more
This illustration shows the accretion disk, corona (pale, conical swirls above the disk), and supermassive black hole of the active galaxy 1ES 1927+654 before its recent surge. Credit: NASA/Sonoma State University, Aurore Simonnet NASA’s Swift Observatory tracks monster black hole’s potential magnetic flip A rare and enigmatic explosion from an active galaxy 236 million light-years … Read more
Une feuille de graphène incurvée et étirée posée sur une autre feuille incurvée crée un nouveau motif qui a un impact sur la façon dont l’électricité se déplace à travers les feuilles. Un nouveau modèle suggère qu’une physique similaire pourrait émerger si deux univers adjacents sont capables d’interagir. Crédit : Alireza Parhizkar, JQI Les physiciens … Read more
Many coastal areas around the world are home to lush green grasslands, all thanks to seagrass beds. As the only flowering plants growing in marine environments, these grasslands are magical: a square kilometer of seagrass stores almost twice as much carbon as terrestrial forests, and it does so 35 times faster. This makes seagrasses one … Read more
A crewed mission to Mars could happen sooner than you think. Astronauts will likely reach the surface of the Red Planet before the end of the 2020s, SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell recently told CNBC’s Shepard Smith. “I think it will be in this decade, yes. People on the moonearlier,” Shotwell said in the … Read more
One of the busiest spring meteor showers, called Eta Aquarids, peaks this weekend. To catch the “shooting stars”, just go outside and watch the southern night sky. The Eta Aquarids reached their approximate peak on Friday morning (May 6), and they will continue to do well in the days to come, hitting up to 30 … Read more
California’s Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute has discovered another gem of the deep with a video of a rare top-tier dragonfish (Bathophilus flemingi), a toothy predator known for its hunting technique consisting of calmly dragging through the water to catch unsuspecting prey. Mbari shared the ethereal video of the torpedo-shaped creature this week. The footage … Read more
The sturdy, calcite-infused exoskeletons of trilobites and their segmented shells are nearly ubiquitous in fossil deposits from the Cambrian to Permian period. But this treasure trove of trilobite fossils has revealed frustratingly little about how Paleozoic animals reproduced over 250 million years of life on ancient Earth. A recently re-examined fossil from the Burgess Shale … Read more