A planet-hunting orbital telescope designed to detect worlds beyond our solar system discovered two distant planets this week five months after its launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, officials said on Thursday.
Astronomers analyzing data from the second release of ESA’s star mapping mission Gaia have shown that our Milky Way Galaxy is still enduring the effects of a near collision that set millions of its stars moving like ripples on a pond. The close encounter likely took place sometime in the past 300-900 million years, and the culprit could be the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy, an elliptical loop-shaped galaxy located 78,300 light-years away. It was discovered because of the pattern of movement it has given to stars in the Milky Way disk.
Countdown: 45 years left until ‘First Contact’
Physicists build giant machines to study tiny particles
NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has made its first detection of its next target, the Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69, more than four months ahead of its 2019 close encounter.
European Space Agency’s seven-year, €1bn mission will investigate the effects of the sun on satellite technology
Pi Men c’s size and mass suggest it may have lots of water
After an almost two-year journey through space, NASA’s Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) caught its first glimpse of Bennu, a carbonaceous asteroid whose makeup may record the earliest history of our Solar System, last week and began the final approach toward the asteroid. Using its multipurpose PolyCam camera, the spacecraft obtained the image of Bennu from a distance of 1.4 million miles (2.2 million km), or almost six times the distance between the Earth and Moon.
Changing how the skins wrap around a tube can achieve different types of motion
We usually associate volcanoes with extreme heat. But new results demonstrate that the Solar System’s largest asteroid, Ceres, is covered in volcanoes that have spewed ice throughout their history.
