Astrophysics

A heavenly alignment will offer a view of a blood-red moon in Earth’s shadow

Here in North America, we are in the midst of a tetrad of lunar eclipses, the second one visible Wednesday morning. A tetrad of lunar eclipses means that there are four total lunar eclipses in a row.

Looking up into the bright Mojave sky in 2004, I strained to keep my eyes on the tiny spaceship 50,000 feet up. "Three, two, one... release, release, release!" came the call over the loudspeakers.

Excitement is building — at least in science circles — for the upcoming announcements of the 2014 Nobel Prizes, along with the inevitable speculation about who might be among this year’s winners.

If the recent discovery of gravitational waves emanating from the early universe holds up under scrutiny, it will illuminate a connection between gravity and quantum mechanics and perhaps, in the process, verify the existence of other universes

Space rocks tend to stick with their own kind

If biologically important organic molecules like amino acids could form in interstellar space, the implications would be enormous. On the Earth we find plenty of amino acid species inside certain types of meteorites, so at a minimum these compounds can form during the assembly of a proto-stellar, proto-planetary system (at least this one) and end [...]

Not all water in the solar system today could have formed in our solar system

The skies of Mars just got a little more crowded. On September 21st, 2014 NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission (MAVEN) fired its engines for some 33 minutes in order to swing into a safe orbit.

Data from the International Space Station-based Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer experiment supports the idea that dark matter consists of the invisible particles called weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs. Clara Moskowitz reports
 

Failure to discover primordial spacetime ripples could open the way for a physicist’s alternative theory