You know you’re living in the space age when a rocket hits the moon, and the industry as a whole points to the sky and, like an angry teacher holding up a paper airplane, asks “Who launched this?!” Truly, that is what occurred this week as an unidentified rocket stage (!) impacted the lunar surface, forming a new and interesting crater and leaving us all wondering how it’s possible to not know what happened.
They don’t call Jupiter “King of Planets” for nothing. It’s massive, really heavy, and now scientists think it ate chunks of other planets to get as big as it is.
That’s right, the gas giant named after Greek and Roman gods is thought to have absorbed a series of small “planetesimals” en route to claiming its place as the biggest planet in the solar system.
China’s Mars sample return mission aims to collect samples from the Red Planet and deliver them to Earth in 2031, or two years ahead of a NASA and ESA joint mission.
Mars might be 300 million miles away, but it’s not immune from the trash. While not a single human being inhabits Mars, there’s already at least one piece of litter dotting the Red Planet according to the Twitter account for NASA’s Perseverance Mars Rover. Reportedly, NASA’s rover spotted an unexpected piece of trash on the red planet in the form of a shiny object wedged between two pieces of rock.
Black holes are the gluttons of the cosmos, devouring everything that veers too close — including light itself. Now, an international team of researchers says they have discovered a supermassive black hole that gobbles up the equivalent of one Earth every second.
Neptune and Uranus have much in common — they have similar masses, sizes, and atmospheric compositions — yet their appearances are in different shades of blue. At visible wavelengths, Neptune is a rich, deep azure hue, while Uranus is a distinctly pale shade of cyan. Astronomers now have an explanation for why the two planets are of different colors.
According to NASA’s database for near-earth objects, a ‘potentially hazardous’ asteroid that’s more than a mile-long is headed our way and makes its closest pass by our planet in centuries on May 27, 2022. The nearest this rock will get to us is at 9:26 AM CST, Friday Morning. The asteroid is labeled ‘potentially hazardous’ because it is an Apollo asteroid meaning it crosses earth’s orbit.
