Bizarre Things: Space & Time

August 20, 2016

Venus-Like Exoplanet With O2 Atmosphere?

How We Escaped from the Big Bang

Mayans Made Major Discovery in Math, Astronomy

Fifth Force of Nature? Clarifying Dark Matter

Latest Headlines

updated 11:41am EDT

Ten Trillionths of Your Suntan Comes from Beyond Our Galaxy

Aug. 11, 2016 — Astronomers have accurately measured the light hitting the Earth from outside our galaxy and determined that 10 trillionths of your suntan comes from beyond ... read more

Much Ado About Nothing: Astronomers Use Empty Space to Study the Universe

Aug. 11, 2016 — An international team of astronomers reports that they were able to achieve four times better precision in measurements of how the universe's visible matter is clustered ... read more

Venus May Have Been Habitable, NASA Climate Modeling Suggests

Aug. 11, 2016 — Venus may have had a shallow liquid-water ocean and habitable surface temperatures for up to two billion years of its early history, according to NASA computer modeling of ... read more

Mars Gullies Likely Not Formed by Liquid Water

Aug. 10, 2016 — New findings using data from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) show that gullies on modern Mars are most likely not being formed by flowing liquid water. This new ... read more

Earth Interacted With Supernova Remnants for 1 Million Years

Aug. 10, 2016 — Physicists have succeeded in detecting a time-resolved supernova signal in the Earth's microfossil record. As the group shows, the supernova signal was first detectable at a ... read more

Watch a Tiny Space Rocket Work

Aug. 8, 2016 — Moving a nanosatellite around in space takes only a tiny amount of thrust. Engineers teamed up, put a nanoscale rocket under a microscope, and watched ... read more

1967 Solar Storm Nearly Took US to Brink of War

Aug. 9, 2016 — A solar storm that jammed radar and radio communications at the height of the Cold War could have led to a disastrous military conflict if not for the US Air Force's budding ... read more

Do Black Holes Have a Back Door?

Aug. 5, 2016 — One of the biggest problems when studying black holes is that the laws of physics as we know them cease to apply in their deepest regions. Large quantities of matter and ... read more

Veins on Mars Were Formed by Evaporating Ancient Lakes

Aug. 5, 2016 — Mineral veins found in Mars's Gale Crater were formed by the evaporation of ancient Martian lakes, a new study ... read more

Demonstrating Strong Electric Fields in Liquid Helium for Tests of Matter-Antimatter Symmetry

Aug. 3, 2016 — Physicists and engineers demonstrated that it is possible to use liquid helium to apply an electric field several times ... read more

Jupiter's Great Red Spot Is So Loud It Heats Up The Planet

What's Rarer Than A Blue Moon? A Strawberry Moon On Summer Solstice

Our Extraterrestrial Neighbors Might've Already Had An AI Revolution

Physics Nitpicks: What Hollywood Gets Wrong About Space

Most Likely Earth-Like Exoplanets Cataloged

Aug. 3, 2016 — An international team of researchers has pinpointed which of the more than 4,000 exoplanets discovered by NASA's Kepler mission are most likely to be similar to Earth. The research outlines 216 ... read more

Space Scientists Observe Io's Atmospheric Collapse During Eclipse

Aug. 2, 2016 — Astronomers have documented atmospheric changes on Io, Jupiter's volcanically active satellite, as the giant planet casts its shadow over the moon's surface during daily ... read more

Mapping the Exotic Matter Inside Neutron Stars

Aug. 2, 2016 — Scientists performed the first accurate determination of the thermodynamic properties of dense quark matter under violent conditions that occur during neutron star mergers, and suggest a step towards ... read more

A Giant Stellar Void in the Milky Way

Aug. 1, 2016 — A major revision is required in our understanding of our Milky Way Galaxy according to an international team. Astronomers have found that there is a huge region around the center of our own galaxy, ... read more

Is Earthly Life Premature from a Cosmic Perspective?

Aug. 1, 2016 — The universe is 13.8 billion years old, while our planet formed just 4.5 billion years ago. Some scientists think this time gap means that life on other planets could be billions of years older than ... read more

Did the LIGO Gravitational Waves Originate from Primordial Black Holes?

July 27, 2016 — Binary black holes recently discovered by the LIGO-Virgo collaboration could be primordial entities that formed just after the Big Bang, report Japanese astrophysicists. If further data support this ... read more

Astronomers Discover Dizzying Spin of the Milky Way Galaxy's 'Halo'

July 25, 2016 — Astronomers have discovered for the first time that the hot gas in the halo of the Milky Way galaxy is spinning in the same direction and at comparable speed as the galaxy's disk, which contains ... read more

Digging Deeper Into Mars

July 25, 2016 — Scientists continue to unravel the mystery of life on Mars by investigating evidence of water in the planet's soil. Previous observations of soil observed along crater slopes on Mars showed a ... read more

Atmospheric Chemistry on Paper

July 21, 2016 — Normally computers speed up calculations. But with his new pen-and-paper formula, a researcher gets his results thousands of times faster than using conventional computer codes. The astrophysicist ... read more

Asteroid That Formed Moon's Imbrium Basin May Have Been Protoplanet-Sized

July 20, 2016 — The asteroid that slammed into the moon 3.8 billion years ago creating the Imbrium Basin may have had a diameter of at least 150 miles, according to a new estimate. The work helps explain puzzling ... read more

X Marks the Spot at the Center of the Milky Way Galaxy

July 19, 2016 — Two astronomers -- with the help of Twitter--have uncovered the strongest evidence yet that an enormous X-shaped structure made of stars lies within the central bulge of the Milky Way ... read more

Weird Quantum Effects Stretch Across Hundreds of Miles

July 19, 2016 — Scientists have discovered strange quantum effects hold, even over hundreds of miles. In longest test of quantum mechanics, researchers find neutrinos, traveling over 450 miles at close to speed of ... read more

Dark Energy Measured With Record-Breaking Map of 1.2 Million Galaxies

July 14, 2016 — A team of hundreds of physicists and astronomers has announced results from the largest-ever, three-dimensional map of distant galaxies. The team constructed this map to make one of the most precise ... read more

Stellar Outburst Brings Water Snowline Around a Young Star Into View

July 13, 2016 — A violent outburst by the young star V883 Orionis has given astronomers using ALMA their first view of a water 'snowline' in a protoplanetary disk -- the transition point around the star ... read more

'Frankenstein' Galaxy Surprises Astronomers

July 12, 2016 — About 250 million light-years away, there's a neighborhood of our universe that astronomers had considered quiet and unremarkable. But now, scientists have uncovered an enormous, bizarre galaxy ... read more

Blue Is an Indicator of First Star's Supernova Explosions: More Than 13 Billion Years Old

July 12, 2016 — Astronomers have discovered that the color of supernovae during a specific phase could be an indicator for detecting the most distant and oldest supernovae in the Universe -- more than 13 billion ... read more

If Life Can Make It Here, It Can Make It Anywhere

July 11, 2016 — If the origin of life is common on other worlds, the universe should be a cosmic zoo full of complex multicellular organisms. Scientists use the evolution of Earth life as a model to predict what ... read more

Surprising Planet With Three Suns Discovered

July 7, 2016 — A team of astronomers have used the SPHERE instrument on ESO's Very Large Telescope to image the first planet ever found in a wide orbit inside a triple-star system. The orbit of such a planet ... read more

Lush Venus? Searing Earth? It Could Have Happened

July 5, 2016 — It may not have taken much in the early solar system to set Earth and Venus on very different paths, according to researchers. A new paper points the way toward what scientists should consider as ... read more

A Giant Impact: Solving the Mystery of How Mars' Moons Formed

July 4, 2016 — Where did the two natural satellites of Mars, Phobos and Deimos, come from? For a long time, their shape suggested that they were asteroids captured by Mars. However, the shape and course of their ... read more

Wednesday, August 3, 2016