A spacecraft that ploughed into a small, harmless asteroid millions of miles away succeeded in shifting its orbit, Nasa said on Tuesday as it announced the results of its save-the-world test. The space agency attempted the first test of its kind two weeks ago to see if in the future a killer rock could be […]
Scientists have used the most detailed supercomputer simulations yet to reveal an alternative explanation for the moon’s origin. The study suggests a giant impact could have formed a moon-like body more rapidly, placing it into orbit around the Earth. In their search for scenarios that could explain the Earth-moon system we know today, researchers at […]
Nasa’s Juno spacecraft has made the closest approach to Jupiter’s icy moon Europa in more than 20 years. Juno on Thursday zipped within 222 miles of Europa, thought to have an ocean flowing beneath its thick frozen crust, raising the possibility of underwater life. Scientists hope to get lucky and observe possible water plumes shooting […]
Scientists have discovered new evidence suggesting there could be liquid water on Mars. The study, led by the University of Cambridge, provides the first independent line of evidence using data other than radar, that there is liquid water beneath Mars’ south polar ice cap. The research team, which included scientists from the University of Sheffield […]
Asteroid impacts on the moon millions of years ago coincided with some of the largest meteorite impacts on Earth, such as the one that wiped out the dinosaurs, research suggests. The study also found that major impact events on Earth did not happen in isolation, but were accompanied by a series of smaller impacts. Researchers […]
Nasa has successfully crashed a spacecraft into a small asteroid as part of a planetary protection test mission. While this asteroid – named Dimorphos – posed no threat to Earth, the aim of the mission was to demonstrate that dangerous incoming rocks can be deflected by deliberately smashing into them. “IMPACT SUCCESS!” Nasa tweeted after […]
Astronomers have detected a hot gas bubble swirling around the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole. They say the finding helps to us to better understand the mysterious environment of the black hole called Sagittarius A*. The observations suggest the gas bubble is on an orbit similar in size to that of Mercury, but making the […]
Extra-terrestrial water has been found for the first time in a meteorite that has fallen in the UK. The Winchcombe meteorite, which crashed into a driveway in the Gloucestershire town last February, is also thought to hold clues about where the water in the Earth’s vast oceans came from. Ashley King, a researcher in the […]
Nasa has released new shots of Neptune, the solar system’s outermost planet, taken by the James Webb Space Telescope. The pictures, taken in July, show not only Neptune’s thin rings, but its faint dust bands, never before observed in the infrared, as well as seven of its 14 known moons. Webb showed Jupiter at its […]
The answer to the mystery of how Saturn got its famous rings may lie in a moon that went missing millions of years ago, according to scientists. Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US believe that this moon, named Chrysalis, orbited the ringed planet for several billion years until it was […]
