Watch live as NASA’s Orion spacecraft performs a close approach of the lunar surface on its way to a distant retrograde orbit, a highly stable orbit thousand…
About 450 light years away, a star is being born. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has taken an image of a protostar – an object that is massive enough to become a star but hasn’t yet begun the process of nuclear fusion – revealing details that have never been seen before.
This protostar is in an area called the Taurus star-forming region, embedded within a dark cloud of dust and gas called L1527. It is only about 100,000 years old, putting it in the first stage of star formation, in which it is still slightly fluffy and lopsided. Over the next few million years, it will continue to compress under its own gravitational pull and then begin to fuse hydrogen into helium and become a fully fledged star.
Ancient bacteria might be sleeping beneath the surface of Mars, where it has been shielded from the harsh radiation of space for millions of years, according to new research.
While no evidence of life has been found on the red planet, researchers simulated conditions on Mars in a lab to see how bacteria and fungi could survive. The scientists were surprised to discover that bacteria could likely survive for 280 million years if it was buried and protected from the ionizing radiation and solar particles that bombard the Martian surface.
The findings suggested that if life ever existed on Mars, the dormant evidence of it might still be located in the planet’s subsurface — a place that future missions could explore as they drill into Martian soil.
The map charts a broad expanse of the universe, from the Milky Way.
The Milky Way is the galaxy that contains our Solar System, and is named for its appearance from Earth. It is a barred spiral galaxy that contains an estimated 100–400 billion stars and has a diameter between 150,000 and 200,000 light-years.
Solar power could be gathered far away in space and transmitted wirelessly down to Earth to wherever it is needed. The European Space Agency (ESA) plans to investigate key technologies needed to make Space-Based Solar Power a working reality through its SOLARIS initiative. Recently in Germany, one of these technologies, wireless power transmission, was demonstrated to an audience of decision-makers from business and government.
The demonstration took place at Airbus’ X-Works Innovation Factory in Munich. Microwave beaming was used to transmit green energy between two points representing ‘Space’ and ‘Earth’ over a distance of 36 meters.
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Remember that some of the molecules in your “fresh” sip of water are actually billions of years old—far older than the solar system itself.
It looks doubtful that water existed on Earth before the solar system in which it is located. However, a recent peer-reviewed study published in the journal Science supports this.
Astronomers arrived at this conclusion by demonstrating that water in our solar system had to have been produced inside the huge cloud of gas and dust that preceded and was required for the creation of the star known as the Sun. This implies that water existed before the Sun exploded into a star, water that eventually made its way to Earth via “wet rocks” such as asteroids or comets.
Uttar Pradesh born Mithilesh Kumar Singh has created an urban vertical garden using PVC pipes to save on cost and space, and also runs Veg Roof, a farming startup that shares gardening tips.
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About 1.2 miles beneath Antarctica, an underground observatory is hunting for “ghost particles.” What it finds could reveal the unseen heart of a distant galaxy.
Astronomers believed in a different sequence in solar system formation with stars igniting before planets began to form. New data says no!
