They’re a fascinating pair: Two icy worlds, spinning around their common center of gravity like a pair of figure skaters clasping hands. Scientists believe they were shaped by a cosmic collision billions of years ago, and yet, in many ways, they seem more like strangers than siblings. A high-contrast array of bright and dark features […]
A researcher from the University of Alaska Fairbanks is part of a NASA mission to get close-up photos of Pluto. Peter Delamere, a space physicist at the UAF Geophysical Institute, is modeling the solar wind’s interaction with Pluto’s escaping atmosphere. NASA launched the New Horizons space probe on Jan. 19, 2006, to take the first-ever […]
To find life in the universe, it helps to know what it might look like. If there are organisms on other planets that do not rely wholly on photosynthesis — as some on Earth do not — how might those worlds appear from light-years away? That’s among the questions University of Washington doctoral student Edward […]
A team of Tel Aviv University and UCLA astronomers have discovered a remarkable cluster of more than a million young stars are forming in a hot, dusty cloud of molecular gases in a tiny galaxy very near our own. The star cluster is buried within a massive gas cloud dubbed “Cloud D” in the NGC […]