Space

A patch of Martian soil analyzed by NASA's rover Spirit is so rich in silica that it may provide some of the strongest evidence yet that ancient Mars was much wetter than it is now. The processes…

Astronomers have used powerful adaptive optics technology at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawai‘i to reveal the precise locations and environments of a pair of supermassive black holes at the center…

The James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) on Mauna Kea in Hawaii has a new way to look at the Universe, thanks to two revolutionary instruments called HARP and ACSIS. These instruments operate…

Astronomers have discovered the exact location and makeup of a pair of supermassive black holes at the center of a collision of two galaxies more than 300 million light years away. Using adaptive…

Two astrophysicists at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., Nikolai Shaposhnikov and Lev Titarchuk, have successfully tested a new method for determining the masses of black holes.…

Astronomers have long suspected the existence of the invisible substance of dark matter as the source of additional gravity that holds together galaxy clusters. Otherwise, astronomers say, the…

How old are the oldest stars" Using ESO's VLT, astronomers recently measured the age of a star located in our Galaxy. The star, a real fossil, is found to be 13.2 billion years old, not very far from…

Travellers have relied on accurate timekeeping for navigation since the development of the marine chronometer in the eighteenth century. Galileo, Europe’s twenty-first century navigation system, also…

"HD 149026b is simply the most exotic, bizarre planet. It’s pretty small, really dense, and now we find that it’s extremely hot." Using Spitzer, NASA’s infrared space telescope,Joseph Harrington of…

ESA’s X-ray observatory XMM-Newton has revealed a new class of exploding stars – where the X-ray emission ‘lives fast and dies young’. The identification of this particular class of explosions gives…