Latest posts from Astronomy Daily: Latest Space News
Three weeks ago, SpaceX's Starship Flight 13 upper stage did something no Starship upper stage had ever done before — it survived a soft, controlled splashdown in the Indian Ocean, fully intact. What followed was a genuine ocean saga...
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Saturn's largest moon, Titan, has lakes and rivers of liquid methane, a thick hazy atmosphere, and — scientists suspect — a hidden network of caves and sinkholes carved not by water, but by liquid hydrocarbons eating through water ice. It's a landscape no wheeled rover and no simple flying drone is built to handle.
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In 1936, physicists Werner Heisenberg and Hans Euler proposed something strange: that a vacuum isn't truly empty, but filled with a simmering sea of virtual particles flickering in and out of existence. One consequence of that idea, if true, is vacuum birefringence — an effect where an extraordinarily strong magnetic field should polarize light passing through empty space, the vacuum itself acting a little like a lens.
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Ask a physicist to describe truly empty space and you will not get silence. You will get a story about a place that is anything but empty — a restless froth where pairs of particles and their antimatter twins blink into existence and vanish again before any instrument can catch them. It sounds like a metaphor. This week, thanks to a dead star and a radio dish in the New South Wales countryside, it started to look like a measurement.
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Every so often, a piece of space junk stops being a nuisance and becomes a gift. This week gave us one of those moments, when a spent SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage — a four-tonne cylinder of dead metal — slammed into the Moon near Einstein Crater at around 5,400 miles per hour, and the world’s telescopes were pointed right at it.
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There is a spacecraft, older than most of the people reading this, drifting through the space between the stars more than twenty-one billion kilometres from Earth. It has no camera trained on anything anymore. It cannot see. But it can still feel ....
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Sometime early on Wednesday morning, Universal Time, a piece of a rocket that has been drifting through space for a year and a half is going to hit the Moon. It will arrive near Einstein Crater, on the Moon’s far western edge, at about five and a half thousand miles an hour....
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There is a question children ask and physicists never quite stop asking: how big can one thing get? This week, astronomers came closer than ever to answering it for galaxies — by finally measuring the edge of the largest one we know.
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Ask any astronomer who has worked a night at a major observatory and they'll describe the same quiet, relentless pressure. You have the telescope for a set number of hours. The sky refuses to cooperate. Clouds drift in from nowhere; the Moon climbs and drowns your faint targets in silver; the air steadies and then turns to soup. Every few minutes you're making a call — point here now, hold that one for later, abandon this one entirely.....
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Ask most people to picture an asteroid and they’ll describe a potato — a single grey lump tumbling through the dark. It’s a fair image. Most asteroids really are lonely, irregular rocks. Some are “contact binaries,” two lobes fused into a peanut shape, like the comet Rosetta visited or the little moonlet DART crashed into. But this week, one long-known asteroid broke the mould entirely.
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How a single black hole stirs an entire galaxy cluster — and why that keeps galaxies in check.
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Look up at Orion on any clear night and you have already met the star at the centre of this week’s biggest astronomy story. Betelgeuse — the deep-orange point marking the hunter’s shoulder — is a red supergiant so vast that, dropped into our own solar system, it would engulf the orbit of Jupiter.
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