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SPACE: The Raging Rivers of Mars

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Mars was wet, until suddenly it wasn’t. Scientists have long seen dry riverbeds slashed across the surface of Mars as evidence that water once flowed freely on the planet. And in 2012, NASA’s Curiosity space rover sent back images of smooth, round pebbles from the bottom of one such riverbed, their lack of rough edges evidence that water had once flowed over them. Now, a new study published today (March 27) in the journal Science Advances catalogs those rivers and reports that their waters likely flowed heavily well into the last epoch, before Mars entirely dried up. “It’s already hard … Read more

SPACE: Ultima Thule Looks Like a Snowman

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Ultima Thule, an icy world 4 billion miles from the sun, looks like a big snowman. At a news conference on Wednesday, scientists working with NASA’s New Horizons mission released several images that the spacecraft took as it flew by on Jan. 1. The scientists now say with confidence that Ultima Thule long ago was two bodies that got stuck together, what they call a contact binary. “Two completely separate objects that are now joined together,” said S. Alan Stern, the principal investigator for the mission. Full Story at the New York Times

Have Aliens Already Visited Earth? – Live Science

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ufo - pixabay

Fox News published a startling article Monday (Dec. 3) with the headline “NASA scientist says Earth may have been visited by aliens.” Unsurprisingly, that news rocketed around the web, with similar articles soon turning up in the New York Post, Russia Today and The Daily Wire. (Fox appears to have been the first major U.S. news source to run with the story.) These articles are based on a document on NASA’s website by Silvano Colombano, a researcher at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. It really does argue that scientists should at least take seriously the notion that … Read more

SPACE: NASA’s Stunning Moon Photo Will Make You Swoon

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Moon - NASA

The moon is pretty enough here from Earth, but it’s even more stunning up close, as this new photograph from NASA reminds us. The image was captured on Nov. 3 by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been circling the moon since 2009. While the crater itself is not quite so young, it’s still pretty fresh — it formed less than 100 million years ago, the spacecraft’s camera team said. “Look closely at this crater. Some might say they see a hole in the ground,” representatives of Arizona State University, which runs the three cameras on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, … Read more

SPACE: NASA’s Insight Lander Arrives on Mars Today

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InSight Mission

Mars is the second-most studied planet — only behind our own — but we know virtually nothing about its interior. All astronomers have to go by is models and theories, but no concrete evidence. NASA’s Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport (InSight) mission aims to change that. InSight will touch down Monday (Nov. 26) around 3 p.m. EST (2000 GMT), in a “6 minutes of terror” touchdown that you can follow live here at Space.com. Shortly thereafter, the lander will begin looking beneath the surface of Mars to reveal the secrets within the Red Planet. About 4.5 … Read more

SPACE: Is There a Large Exoplanet in the Neighborhood?

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exoplanet

Sitting about 6 light-years away from our sun, the red dwarf named Barnard’s star is the nearest solitary star to our solar system and the fastest-moving star in our night sky. It’s also really wobbly. Chalk up the wobbles to old age if you like: The star may have been born some 10 billion years ago — making it more than twice the age of our sun — and it has only 16 percent of the sun’s mass. But astronomers prefer a different explanation. A new paper published today (Nov. 14) in the journal Nature combines 20 years of research … Read more

SPACE: Einstein and The Hulk Get Their Own (Invisible) Constellations

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NASA New Constellations

Einstein and the Incredible Hulk Now Have Their Own Constellations (But You’ll Never See Them) Look up at the night sky, and you won’t see Albert Einstein, the Eiffel Tower, or any of the other 21 gamma-ray constellations that NASA recently named Credit: NASA For thousands of years, humans have looked up at the stars and ordered them into constellations: the Hulk … the TARDIS … Schrödinger’s cat. Not familiar with these? That’s probably because you can’t see them without a gamma-ray telescope — and also, NASA just invented them. To highlight the first decade of discoveries recorded by NASA’s … Read more

SPACE: NASA Wants to Send Humans to Live in the Clouds on Venus

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Venus Cloud Living - NASA==

Popular science fiction of the early 20th century depicted Venus as some kind of wonderland of pleasantly warm temperatures, forests, swamps and even dinosaurs. In 1950, the Hayden Planetarium at the American Natural History Museum were soliciting reservations for the first space tourism mission, well before the modern era of Blue Origins, SpaceX and Virgin Galactic. All you had to do was supply your address and tick the box for your preferred destination, which included Venus. Today, Venus is unlikely to be a dream destination for aspiring space tourists. As revealed by numerous missions in the last few decades, rather … Read more

Europa’s 50-Foot Ice Spikes – Live Science

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Europe - NASA

It’s almost as if Europa has something to protect, something that it doesn’t want us to see. The moon of Jupiter has a saltwater ocean that scientists have long proposed visiting, because at least some researchers think it might contain extraterrestrial life. But there could be a problem: Scientists now report that there’s a good chance 50-foot (15 meters) ice blades defend this fascinating place. In a new paper published yesterday (Oct. 8) in the journal Nature Geoscience, researchers likened the environment at Europa to high altitudes on Earth. In those spots, when the sun blasts fields of ice, it … Read more

SPACE: Colliding Galaxies Create Ring of Black Holes

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Giant Ring of Black Holes

A giant ring of black holes has been discovered 300 million light-years away, offering new clues about what happens when galaxies collide. Using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, astronomers detected a very bright source of X-rays that is likely fueled by either a ring of stellar-mass black holes or neutron stars — the small, dense corpses left after stellar explosions, — according to a new study. The bright X-ray source emanates from the ring galaxy AM 0644-741 (abbreviated AM 0644), which lies approximately 300 million light-years from Earth. By combining data from Chandra and NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers created a … Read more