These may have been the strongest auroras in 500 years | Space Quiz! According to Einstein's Theory of Relativity, what causes an object to warp spacetime? | Scientists find where matter 'waterfalls' into black holes
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This month's ramped-up auroras may have been even more remarkable than we thought. The auroral displays that wowed observers around the world two weekends ago, including folks as far south as Florida in the U.S. and Ladakh in northern India, may have been among the strongest such light shows since record-keeping began.
Scientists have confirmed, for the first time, that the very fabric of spacetime takes a "final plunge" at the edge of a black hole. The observation of this plunging region around black holes was made by astrophysicists at Oxford University Physics, and helps validate a key prediction of Albert Einstein's 1915 theory of gravity: general relativity.
What did our ancestors think when they looked up at the night sky? All cultures ascribed special meaning to the sun and the moon, but what about the pearly band of light and shadow we call the Milky Way?
Ed Dwight got to live out his long-delayed spaceflight dream over the weekend - and set a record in the process. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy selected Dwight to train at the U.S. Air Force's Aerospace Research Pilot School. ARPS was widely regarded as a conduit into NASA's astronaut corps at the time, so the pick made Dwight the United States' first Black astronaut candidate. He never moved beyond "candidate" status, however: Though Dwight completed his ARPS training and the Air Force recommended him for the astronaut corps, NASA didn't choose him.
(NASA, ESA, G. Duchene (Universite de Grenoble I); Image Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America))
Have you ever wondered what our sun looked like when it was young? Although we know the sun to be an unchanging, and even predictable source, of light in our skies, its youthful version some 4.6 billion years ago was quite active. During those formative years, our star spewed solar flares every week or so, despite shining only about a third as bright as it does now. We can't go back in time to witness these transformative events of course - but, thanks to NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, we now have a glimpse into similarly young, sun-like stars emerging elsewhere in the universe.
SpaceX just fueled up its giant Starship rocket, checking another box ahead of the vehicle's fourth test flight. The company performed a "wet dress rehearsal" with Starship at its Starbase site in South Texas today (May 20), filling both of the vehicle's stages with supercold liquid oxygen and liquid methane in a key prelaunch test.
The lead scientist for NASA's Perseverance Mars rover is excited about material that has been stored in the rover's sample tubes, both dropped on the surface of Mars and contained within the rover itself while wheeling about within Jezero Crater. Given the samples of Mars that Perseverance has collected so far, could one of those specimens be what the rover was sent to look for in the first place: evidence of past microbial life on the Red Planet?
Don't monkey around: The biggest reason we watch the "Planet of the Apes" movies is for the chance to see ape astronauts in NASA spacesuits once more! And that actually might be creeping closer to reality, if you believe some of the foreshadowing hints in director Wes Ball's new "Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes." Online theorists, armchair screenwriters and sci-fi speculators are going bananas over the prospect of the franchise launching back to the stars.
