Space

NASA’s Return to the Moon Starts With Launching a 55-Pound Cube

New York Times: In the coming years, NASA will be busy at the moon. A giant rocket will loft a capsule with no astronauts aboard around the moon and back, perhaps before the end of summer. A parade of robotic landers will…

Astronomers Reimagine the Making of the Planets

Quanta Magazine: Start at the center, with the sun. Our middle-aged star may be more placid than most, but it is otherwise unremarkable. Its planets, however, are another story. First, Mercury: More charred innards than fully fledged planet, it probably lost…

Gravitational Waves Continue to Astound

Nautilus: When Galileo Galilei first pointed a small telescope at the heavens in 1609, he began a revolution in astronomy. Today huge telescopes and radio dishes tell us about the universe. But they cannot directly probe those invisible sharply curved…

NASA Hubble Finds First Free-Floating Black Hole

Forbes: For the first time ever, astronomers using NASA’s Hubble telescope has reported the observation of a free-floating black hole wholly independent of a stellar mass companion. Heretofore, black holes have only been identified as supermassive objects at the centers…