Evidence of water vapor in the atmosphere of Jupiter’s moon Ganymede has been discovered for the first time. Astronomers used data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to detect vapor rising from Ganymede. The findings could offer new insights about the moon’s atmosphere. Up front: Ganymede is the largest satellite in our solar system and three-quarters the size […]
Read MoreA team of scientists will embark on a new international research project led by Harvard University to search for evidence of extraterrestrial life by looking for advanced technology it may leave behind. The Galileo Project is led by the Harvard astronomy professor Avi Loeb. Loeb co-founded the project with Frank Laukien, CEO of Bruker Corporation, […]
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Carried on a helium balloon the size of a football stadium, a revolutionary new telescope could forever change the way we carry out our explorations of the Cosmos. Flying at an altitude of 40 km (25 miles) over the ground, above 99.7 percent of the atmosphere of Earth, SuperBIT would carry out observations free of […]
Read MoreFresh off his trip to space, Jeff Bezos on Monday offered to cover up to $2bn in Nasa costs if the US space agency awards his company Blue Origin a contract to make a spacecraft designed to land astronauts back on the moon. Nasa in April awarded SpaceX, owned by rival billionaire Elon Musk, a […]
Read MoreAn “unusually large meteor” briefly lit up southern Norway on Sunday, creating a spectacular sound and light display as it rumbled across the sky, and a part of it may have hit Earth, possibly not far from the capital, Oslo, experts said. Reports of sightings started arriving at around 1am, and the phenomenon was seen […]
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We may have walked on the Moon and sent probes across the solar system, but we know very little about what’s going on inside other planets. Now, for the first time, we have been able to view the interior of one, thanks to NASA’s Mars InSight probe. The probe, which landed in 2018, is equipped […]
Read MoreThe time has come to abolish billionaires. I mean, it’s been coming for a while, but now the alarm is ringing. It started ringing when it first became clear that the existence of billionaires revealed a huge failure in our economic system. When it first became clear where wealth comes from, a combination of inheritance, […]
Read MoreSo Jeff Bezos made it safely back to the universe that most of us lesser mortals inhabit. He graciously thanked his Amazon employees and customers (that’s you and me, folks) who made the realisation of his childhood Star Trek dreams possible. “I want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer because you guys […]
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Friends! Have you heard the news? Musician Lil Uzi Vert is trying to buy a planet? Named WASP-127 b, this is a gas giant exoplanet that’s 1.4 times larger than renowned Big Boy, Jupiter. The world was first alerted to this news by another musician, Grimes: Apparently @LILUZIVERT owns this planet – just a heads up https://t.co/rcyQ2ts7Hj […]
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It’s been a momentous month for space-faring billionaires. On July 11, British entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson’s Unity “rocket-plane” flew him and five fellow passengers about 85 kilometers above Earth. And this week, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ New Shepard capsule reached an altitude of 106km, carrying Bezos, his brother, and the oldest and youngest people ever […]
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Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to [email protected]. Are there any planets outside of our solar system? – Eli W., age 8, Baton Rouge, Louisiana This is a question that human beings have wondered about for thousands of […]
Read MoreIt is one year since the United Arab Emirates launched the Hope space mission from the Tanegashima Space Centre in Kagoshima prefecture, in south-west Japan, to begin its journey to Mars. By 9 February 2021, Hope had crossed 493m km of space and performed the Mars Orbit Insertion (MOI) manoeuvre. On 23 March, Hope manoeuvred […]
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Astronomers have clearly imaged a moon-forming disk encircling a planet outside of our solar system for the first time, and it looks like something from the Lord of the Rings. The disk is surrounding an exoplanet known as PDS 70c which orbits a star that is nearly 400 light-years away with its neighboring planet, PDS […]
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Artist’s impression of the internal structure of Mars. Image: IPGP / David Ducros ABSTRACT breaks down mind-bending scientific research, future tech, new discoveries, and major breakthroughs. For the first time ever, scientists have studied the interior structure of a planet other than Earth by measuring seismic waves on Mars. Three new studies published in Science on […]
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Shed a tear for passengers on Jeff Bezos‘ joyrides to space: their trips may not make them official astronauts. The tragic ruling comes courtesy of the Federal Aviation Administration, which regulates all aspects of civil aviation in the US. In a new order, the transportation agency listed two ways to qualify for FAA Commercial Space Astronaut Wings: […]
Read MoreOne very small step for mankind, one giant ego trip for Jeff Bezos. The world’s richest man ejaculated himself into space this week, in what was not quite the first suborbital tourist flight – Richard Branson beat him up there – but definitely the fastest. “Everybody who’s been up into space, they say that it […]
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Just like Earth, Jupiter is home to polar lights, driven by charged particles racing through the planet’s magnetic field. When these charged particles hit the atmosphere, they release electromagnetic radiation. However, the aurorae of Jupiter are (as might be expected) far more powerful than the iridescent displays we see at home. Hundreds of gigawatts of […]
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“If you read some of the news reports,” Bezos wrote, “you might think we have no care for employees. In those reports, our employees are sometimes accused of being desperate souls and treated as robots.” To his credit, Bezos allows many of these reports to appear in the newspaper he owns, The Washington Post. The Post employees who […]
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In 2019, when astronomers captured the first image of a black hole’s shadow — a bright orange doughnut-shaped halo created by the black hole’s intense gravity bending light around it — it was rightly hailed as a breakthrough. Now, I have joined the Event Horizon Telescope team in following up on their earlier achievement, by […]
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Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids, laments the Rocket Man in Elton John’s timeless classic. In fact, it’s cold as hell, but that doesn’t seem to worry a new generation of space entrepreneurs intent on colonizing the “final frontier” as fast as possible. Don’t get me wrong. I’m no sullen technophobe. […]
Read MoreJeff Bezos’s 11-minute trip aboard a Blue Origin rocket to the edge of space on Tuesday left the world’s richest man feeling “unbelievably good” and his crew “very happy”. But afterwards, as he wondered aloud how fast he could refuel, the rest of the world was left pondering just why the New Shepard rocket had […]
Read MoreA balloon the size of a football stadium could help astronomers get crystal-clear shots of space for a fraction of the cost of an orbital telescope like Hubble. The secret weapon behind the SuperBIT project is a simple helium balloon – albeit one that floats up to 25 miles (40km) above the surface of the […]
Read MoreImage: William Attard McCarthy – McCarthy’s PhotoWorks via Getty Images A telescope carried by a massive helium balloon (it has a volume of 532,000 cubic meters, roughly the volume of a football stadium) will be launched into space in 2022 after years of research and testing to help solve one of the biggest mysteries in the […]
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While 99% of you are stuck here on Earth like a herd of disgusting millionaires – or worse, actual poor people – a bunch of billionaires have spent their summer preparing for jaunts into the inky black beyond. Honest question: who cares? I love space as much as the next person. And I think it’s amazing that […]
Read MoreBlue Origin’s New Shepard crew (L-R) Oliver Daemen, Jeff Bezos, Wally Funk, and Mark Bezos pose for a picture near the booster after flying into space in the Blue Origin New Shepard rocket on July 20, 2021 in Van Horn, Texas. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images) Want the best of VICE News straight to your […]
Read MoreWally Funk, a pilot who was denied the chance to go into space in the 1960s because she was a woman, said “I want to go again, fast”, after returning from a successful flight with the Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos. With Bezos’s brother, Mark, and an 18-year-old Dutch student, Oliver Daemen, the pair spent 11 […]
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Billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos flew to the edge of space on Tuesday on a craft built by his private space company, Blue Origin. It was a bombastic inauguration of Bezos’ entry into the emerging space tourism industry (one seat on New Shepard went for $28 million), and Bezos himself was giddy. In comments after […]
Read MoreJeff Bezos is the most reptilian of billionaires. His heart has never shown evidence of a drop of warm blood. Despite all of the public relations that money can buy, his discomfort with normal human emotion shines through every time he is forced to contort his face into a squinting, uncomfortable smile. It seems overwhelmingly […]
Read MoreJeff Bezos has taken off on his space travel company’s first flight with people on board. The founder of Blue Origin as well as Amazon became the second billionaire to ride his own rocket when he launched from West Texas on Tuesday with his brother, an 18-year-old from the Netherlands and an 82-year-old female aviation […]
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If you’ve ever wanted to take a quick jaunt out into space — or perhaps work at an Amazon warehouse in a galaxy far, far away — you’ll be pleased to know we’re inching closer and closer to those realities. On July 20, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and three crewmates are scheduled to test the […]
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Exactly what happened at the beginning of the universe, 14 billion years ago, is one of the greatest mysteries in physics – there’s no simple way to probe it. That’s because, in its early stages, the universe was filled with a dense plasma – a gas made out of charged particles including electrons and protons […]
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