NASA’s Dawn spacecraft has entered an approach phase in which it will continue to close in on Ceres, a Texas-sized dwarf planet never before visited by a spacecraft. Dawn launched in 2007 and is scheduled to enter Ceres orbit in March 2015. Dawn recently emerged from solar conjunction, in which the spacecraft is on the […]
Planets orbiting close to low-mass stars — easily the most common stars in the universe — are prime targets in the search for extraterrestrial life. But new research led by an astronomy graduate student at the University of Washington indicates some such planets may have long since lost their chance at hosting life because of […]
Research published last week in Science suggested that the makeup of the Earth’s lower mantle, which makes up the largest part of the Earth by volume, is significantly different than previously thought. The work, performed at the Advanced Photon Source at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory, will have a significant impact on our understanding of the […]
On June 11, 2014, the sun erupted with its third X-class flare in two days. The flare was classified as an X1.0 and it peaked at 5:06 a.m. EDT. Images of the flare were captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. All three flares originated from an active region on the sun that recently rotated into […]