dust

NASA’s InSight Mars lander bounces back from dust storm, but its days are numbered

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NASA’s InSight Mars lander has shaken off the effects of a recent dust storm, likely allowing the spacecraft to collect science data for a few more months. InSight went into a protective safe mode on Jan. 7, temporarily shutting down its instruments after a huge dust storm prevented the solar-powered lander from soaking up enough … Read more

Scientists spot supermassive black hole hiding inside thick cosmic dust

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A supermassive black hole masked by a cloud of cosmic dust was found at the center of an active galaxy in new images from the European Southern Observatory (ESO). The galaxy, known as Messier 77 or NGC 1068, is a barred spiral galaxy located about 47 million light-years from Earth, in the constellation Cetus. Taken … Read more

Sublime New Hubble Image Reveals a Thrilling Exchange Between Two Galaxies

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The ongoing interaction between two galaxies 320 million light-years away has been captured in a gorgeous Hubble image. They’re collectively known as Arp 282 in Halton Arp’s Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies, and they consist of a large barred spiral galaxy named NGC 169, about 140,000 light-years across, and a much smaller polar-ring galaxy named IC … Read more

A Building Block of Life May Have Formed in Cosmic Dust Clouds Before Reaching Earth

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There are few bigger questions than how life first got started on Earth, but trying to put in the detective work almost 4 billion years after the event is understandably hard going for scientists. Now it looks as though we might have found another clue.   New research focuses specifically on peptides, smaller versions of … Read more

NASA’s InSight Mars lander awakens from ‘safe mode’ after Red Planet dust storm

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A NASA spacecraft has safely emerged from a precautionary “safe mode” after an intense Martian dust storm. The solar-powered InSight lander, which is designed to study the interior of Mars, entered safe mode to save power on Jan. 7; it went back to “more normal operations” by Jan. 19, the mission said in a Twitter … Read more

The Sun Used to Have Saturn-Like Rings That Stopped Earth From Being a ‘Super-Earth’

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Before Earth and the other planets in our Solar System existed, the Sun may have been surrounded by giant rings of dust similar to Saturn’s, according to a new study.   Those rings of dust may have prevented Earth from growing into a “super-Earth” – a type of planet that is about twice the size of Earth and … Read more

Astronomers Have Detected a Mysterious, Dusty Object Erratically Dimming Its Star

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There are a lot of unexplained objects out there in the Universe, and astronomers have just found another one – a strange, dusty object that may be causing its host star to dim by up to 75 percent.   Often, when we see something block out the light of its star it’s an exoplanet or … Read more

We Finally Have The First-Ever Analysis of Stardust Retrieved From The Ryugu Asteroid

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It’s been over a year since the Hayabusa2 probe delivered its precious cargo of dust from an alien space rock, and we’re finally getting a more detailed glimpse of what makes up asteroid Ryugu.   In two papers published today, international teams of scientists have revealed that, in accordance with analyses conducted by the probe … Read more

It’s Not Actually Size That Determines How Deadly a Meteor Is

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We have a lot to thank meteorites for. Had they not instigated several mass extinction events, including wiping out non-avian dinosaurs, we probably wouldn’t be here today. But some things still don’t add up about the massive scale of decimation they can cause.   “For decades scientists have puzzled over why some meteorites cause mass … Read more