Since we all certainly have Star Wars on the brain today (The Force Awakens opens tonight), let's take a look at a few recent space-related developments that hint of inspiration from the movies.
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Igneous rocks are formed from rising magma, make up the vast majority of the Earth's crust, and tell us a great deal about the Earth's mantle.
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What's the perfect holiday gift for any space fan? It's the 2016 version of the amazing Year in Space Wall Calendar, which is now available to order. Universe Today also has 5 copies to give away!
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Thanks to centuries of ongoing research, modern scientists have a very good understanding of how atoms work and what their individual parts are.
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The first British astronaut to blast off on a journey to the International Space Station (ISS) soared gloriously skyward early today, Dec 15, following the flawless launch of a Russian Soyuz capsule with his Russian/American crewmates from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
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We've featured the videos from
Kurzgesagt many times before here on Universe Today and they're always wonderful. Sometimes a terrific animation with adorable birds is worth a million words. In their latest video, they cover black holes, from birth to death, giving you an overview of these bizarre objects.
Now is the time to catch binocular Comet C/2014 S2 PanSTARRS, as it tops +8 magnitude ahead of predictions this month and crosses circumpolar northern skies. Will this Christmas comet stay bright post-perihelion, rivaling other comets into early 2016?
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After many months of painstaking driving, NASA's Curiosity Mars rover has reached the edge of a massive field of spectacular rippled sand dunes located at the base of Mount Sharp that range up to two stories tall. And she has now begun humanity's first up-close investigation of currently active sand dunes anywhere beyond Earth.
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One of the biggest, most basic questions you can ask is: "why is there something and not nothing?" The reality is that we don't know the answer, we might never know the answer. Let's probe to the edge of what we can explain, and what ideas cosmologists have proposed to explain how we all got here.
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Mars is different from Earth in many ways, being rather cold and inhospitable. But interestingly, a day on Mars is very close to a day on Earth.
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Here are ten of the more interesting facts about the gas/ice giant known as Neptune. Some you may know, others may surprise you
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With NASA's Dawn spacecraft set to enter its final and lowest orbit around the dwarf planet Ceres, spectral measurements are enabling researchers to gradually unravel the nature of the numerous mysterious and intriguing bright spots recently discovered and now conclude that briny mixtures of ice and salts apparently reside just beneath certain patches of the pockmarked surface and that "water is sublimating" from the surface of an "active crater".
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Have you ever wondered how the Sun produces energy to keep us warm here on Earth?
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In this week's episode of the Weekly Space Hangout, we're joined by Carolyn Collins Petersen, aka "The Space Writer". We talk about what it takes to write Planetarium Show, and Carolyn's impressive experience as a space journalist before and after the arrival of the internet.
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Yes, it's that time of year again when everyone struggles with what gifts to buy their family and friends for their holiday-of-choice. Whether you are hoping to foster a love of space and science in a young child, or want to surprise that special adult "Super Space Nerd," we here at Universe Today are here to help our readers out with ideas and recommendations to fit virtually any budget, experience level, and area of interest, including telescopes, books, and other items that the "space/science geek" in your life would love to receive!
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Plummeting to Earth during a fiery atmospheric reentry within the cramped confines of their Russian Soyuz capsule, an international trio of space flyers returned safely to the Home Planet today, Dec. 11
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If seeing the Northern or Southern Lights hasn't been crossed off your bucket list yet, this video is the next best thing to seeing the aurora live. Astrophotographer extraordinaire
Thierry Legault has captured spectacular views of the Aurora Borealis from Norway, filmed in real time.
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A grand finale meteor shower graces the skies of the Earth this weekend, as the
December Geminid meteors reach their peak early Sunday morning into Monday.
This might be a silly question, but what is the official name of that bright ball in the sky? You know, that thing we call the Moon? You might be surprised to know that the official name of the Moon is...
the Moon. And this becomes all the more confusing when there are other moons orbiting other planets, and even asteroids.
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Volcanoes are one of the most impressive and powerful forces of nature, consisting of many different parts that serve different functions
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Every scientist has a story. Though not all have a specific moment they can point to that 'got them into science', they all have people or places or moments which inspired them, or gave them some critical insight, or just kept them going through difficult or tedious times. "We Are All Stardust" is about those scientists, and about those stories.
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The New Horizons spacecraft has been slowly sending back all the images and data it gathered during its July flyby of the Pluto system. The latest batch of images to arrive here on Earth contains some of the highest resolution views yet that it captured of Pluto's surface, taken during the spacecraft's closest approach.
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Mars is the 4th planet from Sun, and the place that holds our imagination because of the possibility that there might be life there. There are some similarities to Earth, like its day length, solid ground and polar caps, but there are many differences as well, like its much smaller size, mass and gravity. And don't forget about the extremely cold temperatures. Let's learn about Mars compared to Earth.
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After its disaster last year, Orbital ATK is ready to visit the International Space station again with its Cygnus resupply ship. Its next launch is set for Sunday at 4:44 PM EST. Here's more information on the launch, and how you can watch it live.
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The New Horizons spacecraft is already 209,437,000 km (130,138,000 miles) past Pluto (as of Dec. 4, 2015), making it 5,226,950,000 km (3,247,880,000 miles) from Earth. So, yes, it's way out there. Recently, it took the closest images ever of a distant Kuiper Belt object, setting a record by a factor of at least 15, according to NASA. The team says this image demonstrates the spacecraft's ability to observe numerous similar bodies over the next several years.
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There is more to the Earth than what we can see on the surface. In fact, if you were able to hold the
Earth in your hand and slice it in half, you'd see that it has multiple layers. But of course, the interior of our world continues to hold some mysteries for us. Even as we intrepidly explore other worlds and deploy satellites into orbit, the inner recesses of our planet remains off limit from us.
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The Zodiac once played an important role in humanity's cosmological beliefs. Today, they are no longer accurate and regarded as an old superstition.
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