Incredibly rare stellar merger may have created strange stars | Russia launches cargo ship to the International Space Station | SpaceX's new Starship video animation is Tron meets Blade Runner in space
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Two particularly strange stars may have formed in a lucky collision, according to new research. What makes these two stars unusual is the high levels of carbon and oxygen at the surface of their atmospheres. Those elements are left behind as a star burns its helium, but that process takes place in the star's core and wraps up long before carbon and oxygen start to dominate the star's atmosphere. Weirdly, these stars seem to still be running through helium despite their odd surfaces.
Russia's robotic Progress 80 cargo ship blasted off Monday (Feb. 14), carrying about 3 tons of supplies and equipment toward the orbiting lab. A Russian Soyuz rocket launched Progress 80 from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 11:25 p.m. EST Monday (0425 GMT or 9:25 a.m. local time on Tuesday, Feb. 15).
A stunning SpaceX animation released Thursday (Feb. 10) shows the Starship system on a future voyage to Mars. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk released the five-minute video during the program's first major update since 2019. He spoke of the fully stacked Starship ready for an orbital trip in (he expects) later 2022 and his hopes to reduce Mars launch costs through frequent liftoffs of Starship and its accompanying Super Heavy rocket.
The Hubble Space Telescope caught an intriguing glimpse of a "weird and wonderful" trio of galaxies merging several hundred million light-years away, according to the European Space Agency. The merging galaxies, known as IC 2431, are producing a lot of environmental effects. This activity is generating star formation and distortions in the area due to all the gravitational interactions between the trio, ESA said.
We love it when a rocket comes together. In October 2021, NASA finished stacking the huge Space Launch System (SLS) rocket for its Artemis 1 moon mission inside the cavernous Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida. That was a big milestone for the agency and its moon-exploration plans, and a newly released time-lapse video captures the process for posterity.
Russia is ready to reactivate its moon exploration agenda, a former Soviet Union enterprise that ended decades ago. The last in the series of pioneering Soviet robotic lunar missions was Luna 24, which sent about 6 ounces (170 grams) of moon material back to Earth in 1976.
You don't necessarily have to be rich or famous to score a ride to suborbital space. The nonprofit Space for Humanity is currently accepting applications for its Citizen Astronaut Program, which trains folks for suborbital spaceflight and will foot the bill for their trip to the final frontier. But you'll have to act fast to get your name in: the deadline is Tuesday (Feb. 15).
We've just seen the first up-close view of the James Webb Space Telescope hard at work in deep space. A special lens within the telescope's near-infrared camera (NIRCam) instrument allowed engineers to take a look at Webb's mirror alignment and to generate a cool view of the telescope, all at the same time. Engineers now also have the assurance that NIRCam is successfully receiving light, which is crucial for its ultimate goal of helping to image objects in space.
The Bernardinelli-Bernstein comet, identified in 2021, is officially the biggest comet ever observed. The new record, reported on the preprint website arXiv and now accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics Letters, bumps the Hale-Bopp comet from the top spot. Hale-Bopp was discovered in 1995 and became visible to the naked eye in 1996; it was about 46 miles (74 kilometers) across. Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein, also known as comet 2014 UN271, has now been calculated to be about 85 miles (137 km) across.
A new museum exhibit hopes to uncover the secrets behind the doodles, in-jokes and coded messages on a blackboard that legendary physicist Stephen Hawking kept untouched for more than 35 years.
The full moon of February, called the Snow Moon, will arrive Wednesday (Feb. 16) at 11:57 a.m. EST (0457 GMT). That same day, Mercury reaches its greatest distance west of the sun, making it a bright but challenging to observe "morning star" in mid-northern latitudes.
Even though you might not be able to see it with the naked eye, photographing the Milky Way isn’t as difficult as it first seems. With a bit of planning and practice anyone with a camera (especially one of the best cameras for astrophotography) and a decent lens can capture the Milky Way.
Video games love a good puzzle, and so it’s no big surprise that black holes have a habit of popping up here and there. What may be surprising, however, is just how many forms and shapes they take. As symbols of the unknowable and the extreme, black holes are highly malleable and appear in all sorts of games, playing many parts.
Feeling lonely after devouring "Leviathan Falls," the final book in "The Expanse" series of space opera novels by Ty Franck and Daniel Abraham (writing as James S.A. Corey) that dropped this past November? Help is on the way! Acolytes of riveting military sci-fi combat should flock to "The Shattered Skies" (Del Rey, 2022), Australian author John Birmingham's scintillating sequel to 2019's "The Cruel Stars."
The cost of living may be on the rise, but that doesn't mean the price of a great Lego Star Wars set is too. You can now save a galactic £30 on a 1,351-piece Millennium Falcon set on Amazon.
