Microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation – “maser” technology – has been redesigned for practical use, with revolutionary implications for a variety of detection devices.
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The Hubble Space Telescope has found a series of tiny, old and pristine galaxies in our Milk Way’s neighborhood which will help scientists better understand how the early Universe evolved.
The space agency is set to launch the world’s best black hole-hunting telescope in a novel way by strapping the satellite to the underbelly of a jet, firing it into orbit from a high altitude.
Now that Curiosity has safely touched down on the Martian surface, it will get to work calibrating its scientific instruments, which will search for past signs of life on the planet.
The Department of Defense is handing down two telescopes it built for spying purposes. By retrofitting the hardware, NASA will be able to look for dark energy at the edges of the Universe.
The word’s biggest science experiment has found a home. Well, two homes. Radio telescopes in South Africa and Australia will search for data from the early days of the Universe.
The European Space Agency has committed to building a new space telescope whose sole purpose will be to unravel the cosmological mysteries of dark matter and dark energy.
A new kind of satellite measuring just four inches on each side could help NASA find nearby planets similar to ours as well as examine asteroids for deposits of rich mineral resources.
With private companies announcing their intentions to mine the lunar surface and asteroids for precious minerals, legal questions have arisen over how far the concept of ownership can be applied.
By measuring the planet’s atmosphere as light from the sun refracted against it, scientists will be better equipped to find and analyze the composition of planets outside our solar system.
As I’m writing this post, NASA’s latest Mars mission – the Mars Science Laboratory, also known as Curiosity – is just hours away from its destination. By the time you […]
Why would so many people take time off from their smart phones to watch the Transit of Venus through a telescope? According to Bill Nye, it is our human desire to explore. If we ever lose that desire, we’re not going to move forward as a species.
A team of astronomers at Johns Hopkins University recently used space and ground-based telescopes to capture the death of a star that was “shredded” by the gravity of a supermassive black […]
There is not much middle ground in the debate over whether life exists beyond planet Earth. Astronomers either believe the odds of life are impossibly rare or mundanely common.
What conditions are scientists looking for in their search for life on another planet? The presence of water is key, explains Bill Nye, aka The Science Guy.
Astronomers are coming to know more about a planet twice the size of Earth which revolves around a star in the constellation Cancer. Just 40 light years away, the planet is a brother of sorts.
The discovery of ancient planets and new data suggesting that carbon may have formed in the early universe has overturned conventional wisdom about the possibility of very early life.
The space telescope has worsened NASA’s relationships with Congress, who felt duped by the exploding cost of the project. Still, the telescope may prove an amazing technical achievement.
Located 10.5 billion light years from Earth, the universe’s oldest cluster of galaxies has been discovered by scientists using a powerful new near-infrared camera called FourStar.
For the first time ever, scientists have watched two spiral galaxies collide, demonstrating how elliptical galaxies form and how black holes can rapidly drain their star-making potential.
The Red Planet will be the closest distance to Earth in over two years tonight in an event called The Mars Opposition. That means martian features and polar caps will […]
The Hubble Space Telescope has confirmed that a distant planet discovered in 2009 is largely composed of water. Its physical attributes could mean an exotic mix of elements are present.
The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI, is turning to individual citizen-scientists to help fine-tune its complex algorithms that search for patterns in noise received from space.
Astronomers using the European Southern Observatory’s HARPS telescope have studied over 100 nearby red dwarf stars over the last six years. 40 percent of these common stars were observed to wobble, a […]
Using a unique telescope at New Mexico’s Apache Point Observatory, astronomers are taking detailed digital photos, half a trillion pixels each, to make a 3D map of our amazing Universe.
Two American physicists have put forward a new theory of how the first planets formed which reverses many aspects of the old model left unchanged for nearly 40 years.
In what should be a boom time for alien-oriented astronomers, given NASA’s recent discovery of an abundance of exoplanets, budget crises are holding back new projects that hold promise.
Dr, Michio Kaku: Sadly, the US government will no longer boldly go into space. Its up to private enterprise to now pick up the slack and it appears that is exactly what its doing.
When last we heard from him, experimental philosopher Jonathon Keats was building a celestial observatory for cyanobacteria. From their petri dishes, billions of these microorganisms would study images from the Hubble telescope, coming to conclusions unavailable to our more highly developed brains. Months later, they’re still at it, and we can barely begin to imagine what they are thinking.
The near earth asteroid 2012 DA14 discovered last year is not going to hit Earth next year, scientists say. Phew. And yet, it will still be coming in way too close for comfort, raising the question of how prepared we are.