Titan gets a dune "makeover"
Titan's siblings must be jealous. While most of Saturn's moons display their ancient faces pockmarked by thousands of craters, Titan - Saturn's largest moon - may look much younger than it really is because its craters are getting erased. Dunes of exotic, hydrocarbon sand are slowly but steadily filling in its craters.
Posted: Jan 18th, 2013
Read morePhysicists on the way to describe the inside of neutron stars
Physicists have succeeded in simulating the strong atomic nuclear interactions to enable its calculability while at the same time preserving the typical characteristics of a neutron star.
Posted: Jan 18th, 2013
Read moreNASA beams Mona Lisa to Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter at the Moon
As part of the first demonstration of laser communication with a satellite at the moon, scientists with NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) beamed an image of the Mona Lisa to the spacecraft from Earth.
Posted: Jan 18th, 2013
Read moreA hidden treasure in the Large Magellanic Cloud
Nearly 200 000 light-years from Earth, the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, floats in space, in a long and slow dance around our galaxy. Vast clouds of gas within it slowly collapse to form new stars.
Posted: Jan 17th, 2013
Read moreESA workhorse to power NASA's Orion spacecraft
ESA agreed with NASA today to contribute a driving force to the Orion spacecraft planned for launch in 2017. Ultimately, Orion will carry astronauts further into space than ever before using a module based on Europe's Automated Transfer Vehicle technology.
Posted: Jan 17th, 2013
Read moreChina to launch 20 spacecrafts in 2013
China plans to launch 20 spacecrafts this year, including the country's third lunar probe Chang'e-3 and manned spacecraft Shenzhou-10, China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) announced Wednesday.
Posted: Jan 17th, 2013
Read moreBlack holes growing faster than expected
Astronomers from Swinburne University of Technology have discovered how supermassive black holes grow - and it's not what was expected.
Posted: Jan 17th, 2013
Read moreNASA'S Webb telescope team completes optical milestone
Engineers working on NASA's James Webb Space Telescope met another milestone recently with they completed performance testing on the observatory's aft-optics subsystem.
Posted: Jan 16th, 2013
Read moreChemCam follows the 'Yellowknife Road' to Martian wet area
Researchers have tracked a trail of minerals that point to the prior presence of water at the Curiosity rover site on Mars.
Posted: Jan 16th, 2013
Read moreLight from the darkness
An evocative new image from ESO shows a dark cloud where new stars are forming, along with a cluster of brilliant stars that have already emerged from their dusty stellar nursery.
Posted: Jan 16th, 2013
Read moreStudents take control of satellites on the International Space Station
200 high-school students participate in MIT's annual Zero Robotics competition.
Posted: Jan 15th, 2013
Read moreNASA issues 2013 call for visionary advanced technology concepts
NASA's Space Technology Program is looking for visionary advanced concepts. This year's annual call for NASA's Innovative Advanced Concepts Program (NIAC) is seeking proposals for revolutionary concepts with the potential to transform future aerospace missions. Proposed concepts should enable new missions or significantly improve current approaches to achieve aerospace objectives.
Posted: Jan 15th, 2013
Read moreAsteroid deflection mission seeks smashing ideas
ESA is appealing for research ideas to help guide the development of a US-European asteroid deflection mission now under study.
Posted: Jan 15th, 2013
Read moreNeon lights up exploding stars
An international team of nuclear astrophysicists has shed new light on the explosive stellar events known as novae. The team of scientists measured the nuclear structure of the radioactive neon produced through this process in unprecedented detail.
Posted: Jan 15th, 2013
Read moreAstronomers find massive supply of gas around modern galaxies
Galaxies have a voracious appetite for fuel - in this case, fresh gas - but astronomers have had difficulty finding the pristine gas that should be falling onto galaxies. Now, scientists have provided direct empirical evidence for these gas flows using new observations from the Hubble Space Telescope.
Posted: Jan 14th, 2013
Read moreDynamic, dark energy in an accelerating universe
If dark energy did not exist, the gravitational pull exerted by matter would slow down the expansion of the universe, but observations have concluded that the opposite is the case.Dark energy is what makes the universe expand in an accelerating way.
Posted: Jan 14th, 2013
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