GREEN BANK, W.Va. — It came from space, hurtling at tremendous speed: a mystery object, reddish, rocky, shaped like a cigar. Its velocity was so extreme it had to have come from somewhere far away, in the interstellar realm. The astronomers in Hawaii who spotted it in 2017 named it ‘Oumuamua, Hawaiian for “a messenger…

Advances in astronomy and science make it more clear by the day that, unexpectedly, the math is on the side of aliens. As late as the 1990s, scientists weren’t sure that there were planets anywhere else in our galaxy or in the universe beyond, but advances like the Kepler Space Telescope have led astronomers to…

PTI November 25, 2023 / 11:52 AM IST The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) announced on November 7 that the High Energy L1 Orbiting X-ray Spectrometer (HEL1OS), tasked with observing hard X-ray activities from the Sun, successfully recorded first high-energy X-ray images of solar flares during its initial observation period on October 29, 2023. Aditya…

(CNN) — An innovative experiment flying aboard NASA’s Psyche mission just hit its first major milestone by successfully carrying out the most distant demonstration of laser communications. The tech demo could one day help NASA missions probe deeper into space and uncover more discoveries about the origin of the universe. Launched in mid-October, Psyche is…

A video that attempts to show just how massive the universe is has left many convinced we can’t be alone in the universe. Admittedly, I am not an astronomer, but I reckon space is pretty big. A vacuum so vast that some social media users have been convinced that humans cannot be alone in the…

A video that attempts to show just how massive the universe is has left many convinced we can’t be alone in the universe. Admittedly, I am not an astronomer, but I reckon space is pretty big. A vacuum so vast that some social media users have been convinced that humans cannot be alone in the…

As a NASA astronaut, Mike Massimino spacewalked four times to repair the Hubble Space Telescope. When he retired in 2014 and began giving talks about his experiences, he assumed audiences would want to hear about the thrills of those exploits. Instead, he found himself fielding questions that were broader and deeper: How did he weather…

Galaxies like our Milky Way are mysteriously hard to come by in our cosmic backyard. New supercomputer simulations have helped astronomers finally answer why. The Milky Way sits within a galaxy cluster on the Supergalactic Plane — a billion light-year-wide sheet, or “supercluster,” upon which large galaxy clusters are pinned. But other spiral galaxies are…

When galaxies merge, we expect them to produce binary black holes (BBHs.) BBHs orbit one another closely, and when they merge, they produce gravitational waves that have been detected by LIGO-Virgo. The upcoming Vera Rubin Observatory should be able to find them before they merge, which would open a whole new window into the study…