Aerospace

Black holes have no hair, but they do have comb overs

Making a black hole is easy. Just squeeze a bunch of stuff into a small enough volume. It doesn't even matter what you use. You can...

Rogue planet found having massive growth spurt

Rogue planets, also known as free-floating planets (FFP) or isolated planetary-mass objects (iPMO), have become a major focus for astronomers. The first such objects were...

A new telescope could help us find another Earth

Astronomers have already discovered nearly 6,000 planets outside our solar system, but none of them are true “Earth twins.” Scientists are especially interested in finding...

Uranus’ moon Ariel had a 170km deep sub-surface water ocean

Interest in icy moons has been growing steadily as they become more and more interesting to astrobiologists. Some take the majority of the attention, like...

This hungry planet grows six billion tons every second

incredible pace—about six billion tons every single second. This is the fastest growth ever seen in a planet, and it’s giving scientists new clues about...

Why the Moon’s “two faces” may have very different interiors

For centuries, humans could only wonder what the far side of the moon looked like. Unlike the near side, which always faces Earth, the far...

Why asteroids tumble instead of spin—gaia data reveals the answer

Asteroids may look like simple space rocks, but their movements hide complex physics. Some spin neatly on their axes, while others tumble chaotically, flipping in...

Gaia telescope reveals a giant wave rippling through our Milky Way

The Milky Way galaxy is far from static. It spins, it wobbles, and now, thanks to the European Space Agency’s Gaia space telescope, we know...

Uranus’ moon Ariel may have once hidden a 100-mile-deep ocean

Uranus’ moon Ariel may look like a frozen, airless world today, but new research suggests that beneath its icy crust, it may once have...

Astronomers detect the first heartbeat of a newborn star

Gamma ray bursts are the most luminous explosions in the universe, briefly outshining entire galaxies in a violent flash of high energy radiation. These -...