Carl Sagan (born November 9, 1934, Brooklyn, New York, U.S.—died December 20, 1996, Seattle, Washington) was an American astronomer and science writer. A popular and influential figure in the United States, he was controversial in scientific, political, and religious circles for his views on extraterrestrial intelligence, nuclear weapons, and religion. (Read Carl Sagan’s Britannica entry…

The SpaceX Crew Dragon craft Endeavour approaches the ISS in 2021 during the Crew-2 mission. Credit: NASA/Michael Hopkins When SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule Endeavour returns to Earth this week, she will set a clutch of records for the most time spent in space by a crewed spacecraft. Launched for her fifth mission in March, Endeavour…

How does extra salty water, also known as briny water, form and evolve on worlds without atmospheres, such as asteroids and moons? This is what a recent study published in The Planetary Science Journal hopes to address as a team of researchers investigated how briny water could still flow for a period of time on…

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Your support helps us to tell the story This election is still a dead heat, according to most polls. In a fight with such wafer-thin margins, we need reporters on the ground talking to the people Trump and Harris are courting. Your support allows us to keep sending journalists to the story. The Independent is…

Astronomers say the discovery of drifting quasars from the early universe are challenging our understanding of how these massive, luminous, and extremely distant objects could have formed, according to new findings made possible by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Quasars are extremely bright celestial objects that are believed to possess massive black holes, and some…

photo by: University of Kansas KU astronomy professor Elisabeth Mills’ proposed space probe, PRIMA, has been chosen by NASA for funding and further investigation. <!– SHOW ARTICLE –> A space probe concept with a KU team member has moved on to the next stage of evaluation for a $1 billion mission set to launch into…

Telstar 1Telstar 1, launched July 10, 1962, relayed the first transatlantic television signals.(more) Although some early space experiments explored the use of large orbiting satellites as passive reflectors of signals from point to point on Earth, most work in the late 1950s and early ’60s focused on the technology by which a signal sent from…

A new study has revealed that some quasars were surprisingly alone in the early universe, confounding astronomers. This image, taken by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, shows an ancient quasar (circled in red) with fewer than expected neighboring galaxies (bright blobs), challenging physicists’ understanding of how the first quasars and supermassive black holes formed. Credit:…

The Dog Tooth of Time by Sarah Al Sarraj. Photo: Sarah Al SarrajThe Dog Tooth of Time by Sarah Al Sarraj. Photo: Sarah Al Sarraj British-Iraqi artist Sarah Al Sarajj hopes to break the National Space Centre’s silence on the contributions of medieval Islamic scholars to modern astronomy