Science

By Lauren Perkins, NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center March 22, 2024Lunar eclipses happen during the full moon phase when Earth aligns exactly between the Moon and Sun, casting Earth’s shadow on the Moon. This shadowing dims the Moon and can turn it a vivid red for several hours. Visible from one hemisphere of Earth at a time, there are three kinds of lunar eclipses: total, partial, and penumbral. Credit: NASAApril’s solar eclipse has stolen the headlines for many months now, and rightfully so with millions of Americans…

Eventually, we're going to want to expand the World Wide Web across the galaxy, and NASA recently demonstrated a key piece of tech that could help, beaming messages via laser across a distance of almost 16 million kilometers (10 million miles). That's about 40 times farther than the Moon is from Earth, and the accomplishment, achieved in November 2023, represented the first time that optical communications have been sent across such a distance. Traditionally, we use radio waves to talk to distant spacecraft – but higher…

Starship, the world's most powerful rocket, flew further and faster than ever before during its third test launch Thursday, although it was eventually lost as it re-entered the atmosphere over the Indian Ocean, SpaceX said. Lift-off from the company's Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas came at 8:25 am local time (1325 GMT) and was carried live on a webcast watched by millions on social media platform X. The sleek mega rocket is vital to NASA's plans for landing astronauts on the Moon later this decade – and SpaceX CEO Elon…

In a scarred and scored terrain on the face of Mars, a giant secret lurks.There, beneath the region known as Noctis Labyrinthus (Labyrinth of the Night), scientists have found evidence of an enormous, ancient volcano – and, possibly, a buried sheet of glacier ice. The discovery makes the equatorial site an attractive option in the search for signs of ancient life on the dry and dusty planet. Finding a hidden volcano was never part of the plan, but when a team led by planetary scientist Pascal Lee of the SETI Institute…

There's something peculiar about dying star Betelgeuse.Yeah, there was the whole sneeze thing. That's been pretty much resolved for now. But before the Great Dimming Debacle of 2019, scientists spotted something even more peculiar about the giant star. Radio measurements of its changing light suggested it was rotating at 5 kilometers (3.1 miles) per second. The big problem with that is that stars of Betelgeuse's vintage should, theoretically, have a maximum rotation speed at least two orders of magnitude lower. So,…

Scientists have devised a way to produce recyclable and stable polymers from cellulose, offering a sustainable alternative to traditional plastics. This development opens up new possibilities in the production of environmentally friendly materials. Above is a transparent film made from the new recyclable polymer developed in this study. Credit: Feng LiCellulose, widely sourced from plant matter, can be transformed into molecules for the creation of a novel category of recyclable polymers, offering a sustainable…

Sound waves fossilized in the maps of galaxies across the Universe could be interpreted as signs of a Big Bang that took place 13 billion years earlier than current models suggest. Last year, theoretical physicist Rajendra Gupta from the University of Ottawa in Canada published a rather extraordinary proposal that the Universe's currently accepted age is a trick of the light, one that masks its truly ancient state while also ridding us of the need to explain hidden forces. Gupta's latest analysis suggests oscillations…

Every night, I—like millions of others—put on a noise machine to help me sleep. Mine offers several types of noise: white, pink, green, and brown. I’ve noticed something strange, though. After about 30 minutes of the noise pumping into my head, I start to hear things. Sometimes it’s music, like a full orchestral score. Other times it’s people having a conversation just out of the range where I’d hear actual words. Occasionally, it sounds like my husband playing a video game.So I do what most people would do when a random…

An asteroid has been named after Indian Professor and…

A nearby exploding star is due to offer a spectacular show that could outshine our North Star this year.The star, which is 3,000 light-years from Earth, is expected to burst in a gigantic explosion – known as a nova – in the coming months. NASA said in a statement that the once-a-lifetime event could be so big that it can be seen by the naked eye. It should be visible for up to a week. It will be "fun and exciting upcoming cataclysm," Bradley Schaefer, an astrophysicist at Louisiana State University, told The New York…