Sky-gazers across the Western Hemisphere will be in for a celestial treat this week when the full moon appears to turn crimson during a total lunar eclipse. The eclipse will be visible in western African and western Europe, the Americas, eastern Australia, New Zealand, northern Japan and eastern Russia Thursday evening and Friday morning, depending on where you live, according to EarthSky. Check Time and Date’s website to see exactly when the eclipse will be visible over your area, weather permitting. A lunar eclipse occurs when Earth is between the sun and moon and the three celestial objects line up in a nearly perfect…
NASA’s two-for-one launch of its newest space telescope, SPHEREx — designed to seek out the key ingredients for life in the Milky Way — alongside a sun-focused mission called PUNCH is facing another delay. Both missions were expected to lift off together aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at 11:10 p.m. ET (8:10 PT) Monday from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. But weather conditions were only 20% favorable for a launch, and mission teams from NASA and SpaceX decided to stand down from the attempt, the space agency said. There are opportunities to take off available through April, and…
For about 50 years, the scientific community has been grappling with a substantial problem: There isn’t enough visible matter in the universe. All the matter we can see — stars, planets, cosmic dust and everything in between — can’t account for why the universe behaves as it does, and there must be five times as much of it around for researchers’ observations to make sense, according to NASA. Scientists call that dark matter, because it does not interact with light and is invisible. In the 1970s, American astronomers Vera Rubin and W. Kent Ford confirmed dark matter’s existence by looking at…
Sharks have a reputation for being silent killers — the top ocean predators are stealthy hunters, but they also lack sound-producing organs found in many other fish. Now, a groundbreaking new study has revealed one shark species may be more vocal than previously thought, making noises comparable to the sound of a balloon popping. For the first time, scientists have recorded evidence of the rig shark — Mustelus lenticulatus — actively producing sound by snapping its teeth, according to research published Tuesday in the journal Royal Society Open Science. “How sharks maintain social groupings or communicate was thought to be largely body language…
Astronomers have made the surprising discovery of oxygen and elements like heavy metals in the most distant known galaxy. The galaxy is 13.4 billion light-years away, meaning it formed in the early days of the universe. Astronomers believe the big bang created the universe 13.8 billion years ago. The unusually large, luminous distant galaxy, called JADES-GS-z14-0, was initially detected in January 2024 using the James Webb Space Telescope, which observes the universe in infrared light that’s invisible to the human eye. The space observatory can effectively peer back in time to the beginning of a mysterious era called Cosmic Dawn, or the first few hundred…
NASA’s Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore — who gained international attention as their planned short stay in space stretched into a more than nine-month, politically fraught mission — are finally home. Williams and Wilmore, alongside NASA’s Nick Hague and cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov of Russia’s Roscosmos space agency, safely splashed down off the coast of Tallahassee, Florida at 5:57 p.m. ET Tuesday. The crew’s highly anticipated return came after the crew climbed aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule and departed the International Space Station at 1:05 a.m. ET Tuesday. The quartet are part of the Crew-9 mission, a routine staff rotation jointly operated…
Space is getting crowded — humans have now placed over 20,000 satellites into orbit since the start of the space age, and there are plans to launch thousands more over the next few years. Some of those satellites have already burned up in the atmosphere or fallen back to Earth, often into the ocean, but more than 13,000 are still up there. About a fifth are inactive, simply orbiting as as space junk. Over the last couple of decades, hundreds of these dead satellites have collided to create millions of pieces of shrapnel. That creates a constant risk of collision for active satellites and for the International Space…
A partial solar eclipse on Saturday will make it look as though the moon has taken a bite out of the sun over parts of the world. The celestial event comes just two weeks after a lunar eclipse created a “blood moon” in the night sky. A partial solar eclipse occurs when the moon moves between the sun and Earth but the celestial bodies aren’t completely aligned, according to NASA. The moon only blocks part of the sun’s face during a partial solar eclipse, creating a crescent shape. During Saturday’s celestial event, the moon will appear to pass in front of the sun…
Perhaps the greatest, mind-bending quirk of our universe is the inherent trouble with timekeeping: Seconds tick by ever so slightly faster atop a mountain than they do in the valleys of Earth. For practical purposes, most people don’t have to worry about those differences. But a renewed space race has the United States and its allies, as well as China, dashing to create permanent settlements on the moon, and that has brought the idiosyncrasies of time, once again, to the forefront. On the lunar surface, a single Earth day would be roughly 56 microseconds shorter than on our home planet…
President Donald Trump provided an update on the stranded NASA astronauts set to make their way back to Earth in a social media post on Monday. In a Truth Social post, Trump said that he recently conferred with Janet Petro, the acting administrator of NASA, who is coordinating the return of NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams. “She is coordinating our Team of highly respected Scientists, Space Engineers, and various other ‘geniuses,’ who has agreed to let our Astronauts come home long prior to the two week period originally approved by NASA,” Trump wrote. “Janet was great. She said,…
