Sudden shrieks of radio waves from deep space keep slamming into radio telescopes on Earth, spattering those instruments' detectors with confusing data. And now, astronomers are using artificial intelligence to pinpoint the source of the shrieks, in the hope of explaining what's sending them to Earth from — researchers suspect — billions of light-years across space.
Astronomers announced Wednesday that they had discovered the nearest potentially habitable planet outside our solar system.
The newfound exoplanet — a so-called super-Earth named GJ 357 d — lies 31 light-years away from our solar system. It’s about six times more massive than our planet and orbits in its host star’s habitable zone, where water could exist in liquid form on the surface.
Scientists used a black hole to test Einstein's theory of relativity. Here's the result.
"Einstein's right, at least for now,” says Andrea Ghez, a co-lead author of the research and astronomy professor at UCLA.
A new look at lunar rocks suggests that the moon formed when a Mars-size rock struck Earth while it was still young and covered in molten rock.
Think of it as a crash course in averting asteroid crashes.
As part of the 2019 Planetary Defense Conference, NASA, FEMA and their international partners will conduct a so-called tabletop exercise designed to show how they would react to the discovery of a fictional asteroid heading our way.
The universe is moving too fast and nobody knows why.
Back in the early years of the universe, right after the Big Bang, everything blasted away from everything else.
But when astronomers have tried to directly measure how fast the universe is expanding today — a more difficult task, because everything is farther apart now — things seem to be moving faster than those calculations would predict. And a new paper, based on highly detailed observations taken using the Hubble Space Telescope, appears to confirm that finding: Everything is moving about 9 percent too fast.
“We live on a hunk of rock and metal that circles a humdrum star,” Carl Sagan declared in 1996, in one of the astronomer's last interviews.
It’s a simplistic description of Earth, but that picture is changing.
Julian Assange arrested in London, Benjamin Netanyahu re-elected in Israel, Sudan's president Omar al-Bashir steps down and more.
An astronomer at Columbia University has a new guess about how hypothetical alien civilizations might be invisibly navigating our galaxy: Firing lasers at binary black holes (twin black holes that orbit each other).
The idea is a futuristic upgrade of a technique NASA has used for decades.
Scientists track pollution in the air as well as in the world’s oceans, lakes and rivers. And now, there's a simple interactive tool that affords a detailed look at pollution of a different kind: artificial light.
When Israel’s Beresheet spacecraft launched toward the moon last week, it was carrying a mysterious cargo. Mission planners called it a time capsule but hinted that that wasn’t the whole story.
Now the truth is out: The little lunar probe carries a 30-million-page archive of human knowledge etched into a DVD-size metal disc.
Dragons may be make-believe, but a dragon-shaped aurora borealis that flickered in the sky over Iceland this month was breathtakingly real — just have a look at this dramatic photograph.
The photo, taken by Jingyi Zhang on Feb. 6, became NASA's astronomy photo of the day on Feb. 18 and has been widely viewed online since. It shows a swirling green aurora over a dark, snowy landscape where a solitary figure — the photographer's mother — stares up at the sky as if awestruck.
Say hello to Hippocamp, a celestial pipsqueak that's making big waves at the edge of our solar system. With help from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have confirmed the existence of this tiny moon in orbit around Neptune.
The newly characterized moon — named after a mythical half-horse, half-fish sea creature — is the smallest moon yet discovered in orbit around the outermost planet. NASA says the 20-mile-wide moon is about 100 million times fainter than the faintest star that's visible to the naked eye
It’s a hit! A harpoon designed to help clean up the hundreds of thousands of pieces of space junk now orbiting Earth passed a key test earlier this month when it successfully speared a piece of simulated debris.
Ready to feel small? A striking new photograph taken by China’s Longjiang-2 satellite affords a rare view of the lunar far side — the side that’s impossible to see from the surface of our planet — with Earth visible in the background as a tiny blue marble.
"Few pictures have been taken that show the entire far side of the moon, so we're pretty proud to have helped take this picture," Cees Bassa, an astronomer at ASTRON, the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy, told NBC News MACH in an email. Bassa is a volunteer astronomer at the Dwingeloo Radio Observatory in the Netherlands, where the photo was processed.
Seems we weren't quite right about the Milky Way.
Last year we learned that our home galaxy is bigger than we imagined, and now comes word that its shape isn't quite what many have believed it to be. Instead of being a mostly flat spiral disk of stars and gas, new research by astronomers in China and Australia shows that the Milky Way is significantly warped at its edges.
The summer solstice is an annual astronomical phenomenon that brings the longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere.
NBC News Mach explains how the sun’s titled rotational axis creates the solstice. Read more here.
