View larger. | This elevation map depicts the South Pole-Aitken basin on the moon. It is the moon’s largest crater. The lowest regions are in blue and purple. A new study suggested the crater is more circular in shape than scientists previously thought. Image via NASA/ GSFC/ University of Arizona. The South Pole-Aitken basin is … Read more
Alexandra E. Petri wrote an interesting article about a humpback whale, published in The New York Times on December 12, 2024. She describes a male humpback whale that traveled three oceans, during the years 2013 to 2022. This whale has now broken the record for the longest documented distance yet traveled by a humpback. The … Read more
In 1971, the Soviet Mars 3 lander became the first spacecraft to land on Mars, though it only lasted a couple of minutes before failing. More than 50 years later, it’s still there at Terra Sirenum. The HiRISE camera NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter may have imaged some of its hardware, inadvertently taking part in what … Read more
“2001: A Space Odyssey” offered more questions than answers, and the movie’s ambiguous and metaphysical final act has subsequently been debated for well over half a century. But 40 years ago, in December 1984, a movie sequel had a decent stab at explaining some of the mysteries Stanley Kubrick’s sci-fi classic — with its psychedelic … Read more
White dwarfs are giving up more of their secrets, with the discovery that the hotter they are, the puffier their outer layers are. While this finding may sound immaterial, understanding the structure of white dwarfs could ultimately prove key in discovering what mysterious dark matter is made from. White dwarfs are the core remains of … Read more
“All Good Things”, “What You Leave Behind”, “Endgame”… Now “The New Next Generation” becomes the latest addition to the pantheon of memorable “Star Trek” season finales, as the franchise’s only out-and-out comedy, “Lower Decks”, goes out in style. After last week’s multiverse-hopping adventures, the race is on to save the prime universe from a fissure … Read more
Firefly Aerospace’s first mission to the moon is nearly ready to fly. The company’s Blue Ghost lunar lander arrived at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida on Monday (Dec. 16) for integration with the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that will launch the robotic probe — as well as the private Japanese moon lander Resilience … Read more
New research may have delivered bad news for scientists who thought they had discovered a “missing link” black hole in a dense Milky Way star cluster. The new findings imply that, rather than a rare intermediate-mass black hole, there is a cluster of stellar-mass black holes in Omega Centauri, believed to be the remains of … Read more
The globular cluster M53, imaged here by the Hubble Space Telescope, is home to mostly older stars – but also a population of strange, young-looking blue straggler stars. Credit: ESA/Hubble, NASA Meet HD 65907, an imposter. It’s a star that appears far too young for its age. Astronomers have finally cracked the case of this … Read more
Planets can differ from the swirling envelopes of gas and dust from which they are born, astronomers have found. The revelation seems to indicate that the planet formation model favored by scientists may be overly simple. A team led by researchers from Northwestern University in Illinois made this discovery while observing a still-forming planet and … Read more