China’s ambitious mission to explore resource technologies at the moon’s south pole is gaining momentum, with the intriguing possibility of featuring a humanoid element. Wang Qiong, the chief designer of the Chang’e 8…
Although no direct evidence of life has been discovered on Mars, a recent NASA study suggests that microbes might survive beneath frozen water on the planet’s surface. Using computer modeling, the researchers demonstrated…
A new theoretical model offers a way to estimate the likelihood of intelligent life emerging in our universe—and in any hypothetical universes beyond. This approach has similarities to the well-known Drake Equation, devised…
In a pristine environment at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, scientists have successfully installed a key component onto the Roman Space Telescope. The Roman Coronagraph Instrument, designed to block out starlight,…
Konstantinos Dimopoulos, Lancaster University How did everything begin? It’s a question that humans have pondered for thousands of years. Over the last century or so, science has homed in on an answer: the…
Neil Turok, University of Edinburgh We live in a golden age for learning about the universe. Our most powerful telescopes have revealed that the cosmos is surprisingly simple on the largest visible scales….
The world’s first wooden satellite has blasted off on a SpaceX rocket, its Japanese developers said Tuesday, part of a resupply mission to the International Space Station. Scientists at Kyoto University expect the…
Neutron stars are among the most extraordinarily dense objects in the Universe, with an unparalleled capacity to compress vast amounts of matter within a compact space. These stars can contain several solar masses…
A team led by researchers at MIT in the United States has discovered large molecules containing carbon in a distant interstellar cloud of gas and dust. This is exciting for those of us…
Jennifer Chu | MIT News A quasar is the extremely bright core of a galaxy that hosts an active supermassive black hole at its center. As the black hole draws in surrounding gas and dust,…