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This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. Solar cycle 25 is kicking off in style. Our sun has a cycle of activity and as it becomes more active, there will be more sightings of the northern (and southern) lights. That is what is happening this … Read more
March is a month of transition, as we change seasons from winter to spring. And at this particular time of year, we can look into the night sky for some sky objects with rather unusual aspects. Here’s a tour of some tantalizing targets for skywatchers that are visible each year in March, and the odd … Read more
When you’re older, your home town will feel different. That’s true for everybody. But for people living today, the changes will be impossible to ignore. We usually measure climate change in terms of rising temperatures. But scientists say there’s another way of thinking about it: spatial displacement. In a study from 2019, researchers found … Read more
Representatives from the Polaris Program hold a Ukrainian flag that will fly into space later in 2022. (Image credit: Polaris Program/Twitter) The all-private Polaris Dawn mission publicly shared its support for Ukraine as the nation continues to endure attacks from Russia. The crewed Polaris Dawn, led by Inspiration4 founder and tech billionaire Jared Isaacman, will … Read more
We stick calendars on the wall or load them up on our phones, but the people of the third millennium BCE used giant rocks, new research suggests. A new study explains how Stonehenge may have originally been used to keep track of a solar year (aka tropical year) of 365 and a quarter days, which … Read more
NASA’s first crewed landing of the Artemis program will see boots on the moon no earlier now than 2026, the agency’s inspector general said. NASA Inspector General Paul Martin delivered the news to lawmakers during a House Space and Aeronautics Subcommittee hearing on Tuesday (March 1) as part of a larger update on the Artemis … Read more
The first team to disable a disease gene directly in a person through an infusion of the genome editor CRISPR reported yesterday that levels of the toxic protein made by the gene dropped as much as 93% for up to 1 year. The researchers hope the long-term reduction means patients in the clinical trial will … Read more
Virgin Galactic’s suborbital spaceliner is grounded at the moment, but the company is confident it’ll be fully up and running by the end of the year. Virgin Galactic flies people and payloads to suborbital space using an air-launch strategy: A carrier plane called VMS Eve drops the six-passenger, two-pilot VSS Unity space plane at an … Read more
The Chicxulub asteroid that ended the reign of the dinosaurs is one of the most momentous impact disasters in Earth’s history, and scientists have now identified the time of year when this deadly event took place. New evidence suggests the asteroid hit in the spring for the Northern Hemisphere, which would be fall (or autumn) … Read more
A global analysis of sea levels over the past 2,000 years has found a rapid rate of increase in line with the Industrial Revolution. By 1863, researchers found the rate of sea level rise had clearly surpassed background variability. Unsurprisingly, it’s around this time that the first hints of ocean warming and glacier melt from … Read more