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Giant Bubbles Expanding From The Milky Way Could Be Explained by a Single Event

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Two sets of giant bubbles that extend thousands of light-years above and below the plane of the Milky Way could have been produced by the same event, in spite of their significant difference in size.   They’re called the Fermi bubbles and the eROSITA bubbles, and astronomers believe they were the result of activity by … Read more

Two black holes locked in cosmic dance near galaxy’s center are doomed to crash

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Two huge black holes are locked together by gravity as they inevitably spiral towards a collision, researchers have found in a new study. Researchers in a new study have spotted two supermassive black holes that whip around each other every two Earth years, on average, with respective masses each of hundreds of millions of times … Read more

NASA control center named for Apollo launch director Rocco Petrone

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The NASA control center from where engineers oversaw the launch of the first astronauts to walk on the moon now bears the name of one of its pioneering directors. Agency officials gathered at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Tuesday (Feb. 22) to honor the late Rocco Petrone, who as director of launch operations … Read more

A Mysterious Desert Bacterium Has Evolved Its Own, Unique Ability to Photosynthesize

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Photosynthesis quite literally changed our world. Plants ‘eating’ sunlight and ‘breathing out’ oxygen transformed Earth’s entire atmosphere into the one we now breathe, and fuel our ecosystems with energy.   Now researchers have caught a cunning species of bacteria with stolen photosynthesizing technology. And their molecular, light-eating device is unlike any we’ve ever seen. “The … Read more

Fowl play: Turkey turmoil at NASA center in California

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A flock of wild turkeys has gotten a little too interested in space exploration, so a NASA facility is helping the hefty birds explore a nice reserve instead. NASA’s Ames Research Center in California just south of San Francisco covers some 500 acres and hosts scientists working on topics from exoplanets to flight technology — … Read more

Epic Search of Millions of Stars Finds No Traces of Intelligent Alien Life

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Are there civilizations somewhere else in the Universe? Somewhere else in the Milky Way? That’s one of our overarching questions, and an answer in the affirmative would be profound.   Humanity’s pursued the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) in one form or another since shortly after the advent of radio waves in the early 20th … Read more

What happens at the center of a black hole?

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Paul M. Sutter is an astrophysicist at SUNY Stony Brook and the Flatiron Institute, host of Ask a Spaceman and Space Radio, and author of How to Die in Space. Sutter contributed this article to Space.com’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. The singularity at the center of a black hole is the ultimate no man’s land: … Read more

Astronomers Join Forces to Push Back Against Satellite ‘Pollution’ Ruining The Skies

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The number of active satellites in the night sky has more than doubled since 2019 – from around 2,200 to 5,000. That is mostly due to Starlink, a SpaceX project aimed at providing internet anywhere in the world through ‘mega-constellations’ of satellites.   Since it began, Starlink has launched over 2,000 satellites. Unfortunately, the thousands of … Read more

Mysterious Link Between Vitamin D And COVID-19 Reaffirmed in ‘Striking’ New Findings

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Israeli scientists said they found “striking” differences in the chances of getting seriously ill from COVID-19 when they compared patients who had sufficient vitamin D levels prior to contracting the disease, with those who didn’t.   A study published Thursday in research journal PLOS One found that about half of people who were vitamin D deficient before getting COVID-19 … Read more