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ESA’s “Design for Demise” strategy makes satellites easier to burn up during reentry, reducing space debris risks. It might be counter-intuitive, but designing satellites to better fall apart is one of the key strategies to combat space debris. Developed by ESA’s Clean Space initiative, the app...

Data from NASA’s Voyager 1 Spacecraft show that the direction of the magnetic field has been slowly turning ever since the spacecraft crossed into interstellar space. NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft made history in 2012 by entering interstellar space, leaving the planets and the solar wind b...

New research reveals that the distant galaxy W2246-0526 is expelling tremendously turbulent gas (a phenomenon never seen before in an object of this kind) and is tearing itself apart. In a far-off galaxy, 12.4 billion light-years from Earth, a ravenous black hole is devouring galactic grub. Its feed...

NASA’s Curiosity Mars Rover continues its campaign to study active sand dunes on Mars, scooping and analyzing samples. At its current location for inspecting an active sand dune, NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover is adding some sample-processing moves not previously used on Mars. Sand from the...

The search for Earth-like planets has intensified as astronomers continue to look for potential life on other worlds. Now one of the leading exoplanet hunters is being recognized for his contributions to science. On Tuesday, Harvard University astronomy professor David Charbonneau was honored as one...

Using the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers reveal a rapidly spinning black hole ripping apart a passing star that came too close. An extraordinarily brilliant point of light seen in a distant galaxy, dubbed ASASSN-15lh, was thought to be the brightest supernova ever seen. But new observations fro...

The Cassini Spacecraft continues to make its unprecedented series of weekly dives between Saturn and its rings, revealing surprising details about the planet. Scientists are finding — so far — that the planet’s magnetic field has no discernible tilt. This surprising observation, which means th...

The Cassini Spacecraft ended its journey on September 15 with a plunge into the atmosphere of Saturn, but analysis continues on the mountain of data the spacecraft sent during its long life. Some of the Cassini team’s freshest insights were presented during a news conference today at the Ameri...

The afterglow from the distant neutron-star merger detected last August has continued to brighten – much to the surprise of astrophysicists studying the aftermath of the massive collision that took place about 138 million light-years away and sent gravitational waves rippling through the unive...

There are currently over 3500 confirmed exoplanets known thanks to the remarkable sensitivity of the Kepler spacecraft and to technological advances in space and ground-based methods made over the past dozen years. Relatively little is known, however, about the minor bodies that might orbit within t...

For the first time, astronomers have directly imaged the formation and expansion of a fast-moving jet of material ejected when the powerful gravity of a supermassive black hole ripped apart a star that wandered too close to the massive monster. The scientists tracked the event with radio and infrare...

Harnessing the exquisite sensitivity of the National Science Foundation’s Green Bank Telescope (GBT), astronomers have given one of Einstein’s predictions on gravity its most stringent test yet. By precisely tracking the meanderings of three stars in a single system – two white dwarf stars and one u...

Pasadena Conference to Include New Insight into Dwarf Planet Ceres As NASA’s Dawn spacecraft prepares to wrap up its groundbreaking 11-year mission, which has included two successful extended missions at Ceres, it will continue to explore — collecting images and other data. Within a few months, Dawn...

A UK team of astronomers report the first detection of matter falling into a black hole at 30% of the speed of light, located in the center of the billion-light-year distant galaxy PG211+143. The team, led by Professor Ken Pounds of the University of Leicester, used data from the European Space Agen...

A small asteroid has been caught in the process of spinning so fast it’s throwing off material, according to new data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and other observatories. Images from Hubble show two narrow, comet-like tails of dusty debris streaming from the asteroid (6478) Gault. Each tail r...

NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has for the first time seen the aftermath of a star that was violently ripped apart by a supermassive black hole. Catching such a rare event in action will help astronomers understand these mysterious phenomena. The observation is reported in...

For the first time, astronomers using ALMA have witnessed 3D motions of gas in a planet-forming disk. At three locations in the disk around a young star called HD 163296, gas is flowing like a waterfall into gaps that are most likely caused by planets in formation. These gas flows have long been pre...

California’s devastating Kincaid Fire located in Sonoma County has grown to over 66,000 acres and NASA’s Terra satellite captured this dramatic image of the smoke plume cascading down the coast. The fire is located northeast of Geyserville and is classified as a “vegetation fire&#8...

NASA’s Terra satellite using the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument aboard captured this image of the Getty fire shortly after it began in the early morning hours of October 28, 2019. Dubbed the Getty Fire because of its proximity to the Getty Center in Los Angele...

Planetologists show that the meteorite contains minerals that formed under the presence of water on small planetesimals in the early history of our solar system. Planetologists from Münster University show that the meteorite contains minerals that formed under the presence of water on small planetes...

The subject of this Hubble Space Telescope Picture of the Week, a spiral galaxy named NGC 1589, was once the scene of a violent bout of cosmic hunger pangs; as astronomers looked on, a poor, hapless star was torn apart and devoured by the ravenous supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy....

High-resolution imaging reveals black hole’s hideout in extra-galactic star cluster. Like detectives carefully building a case, astronomers gathered evidence and eliminated suspects until they found the best evidence yet that the death of a star, first witnessed in X-rays, could be traced back...