Science

A planetary alignment is reportedly slated for the end of the month.  Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Uranus – and our moon – will be visible in the night sky on Tuesday, March 28.  “Don’t forget to look to the sky the end of the month for the planetary alignment which will have at least five planets – plus the moon – all visible in almost an arc shape as seen from Earth,” a former Apollo astronaut tweeted earlier this month.  Speaking with “Good Morning America” this week. NASA’s Bill Cooke, who leads the agency’s Meteoroid Environment Office at the Marshall Space Flight Center, said that the crescent moon is the “capper,” and will be halfway lit up just above Mars.  ASTEROID 2023 DZ2 TO PASS BETWEEN EARTH AND MOON THIS WEEKEND “Per...

NASA, on Monday, named the four-person crew who will be launched to the moon on the first manned crew to the lunar satellite in over 50 years. The crew consists of three firsts for the space agency, including the first woman, first person of color, and first Canadian to be sent to the moon. The crew of NASA’s Artemis II mission (left to right): NASA astronauts Christina Hammock Koch, Reid Wiseman (seated), Victor Glover, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen. (NASA) “The Artemis II crew represents thousands of people working tirelessly to bring us to the stars. This is their crew, this is our crew, this is humanity’s crew,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a press release. “NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Hammo...

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has captured the fabric of space-time being warped. In an image captured by the observatory’s NIRCam instrument, distant galaxies are magnified and warped due to an effect called gravitational lensing.  Gravitational lensing occurs when a celestial object like the foreground galaxy cluster has such a massive gravitational pull that it warps time and space around it. The lensing galaxy cluster, known as SDSS J1226+2149, lies at a distance of around 6.3 billion light-years from Earth in the constellation Coma Berenices.  WEBB SPACE TELESCOPE CAPTURES DUST STORM ON REMOTE PLANET Many small galaxies are scattered on a black background: mainly, white, oval-shaped and red, spiral galaxies. To the lower right is a galaxy cluster, with a very l...

Researchers say they have discovered a jet from a galaxy with a black hole at its center changed its direction to point toward Earth.  The galaxy, named PBC J2333.9-2343, has changed classification due to the unique activity within its core. It was previously classified as a radio galaxy, but the new research released in March has revealed otherwise.  Located more than 656 million light-years away, it is now classified as a giant radio galaxy that has a blazar in its core.  Blazars are a type of galaxy powered by a black hole. They shoot jets of high-energy particles that move at rates close to the speed of light toward Earth, making them appear as bright spots.  UK SCIENTISTS FIND ONE OF LARGEST BLACK HOLES EVER DISCOVERED This artist’s concept shows a “feeding,”...

Dutch researchers were able to create a massive meatball of flesh grown using the DNA of a wooly mammoth this week. A team of scientists put the fleshy blob on display at the NEMO science museum in the Netherlands. The team manufactured the girth with the help of an Australian cultured meat company, Vow, which has entertained the possibility of mass production and sale of the meat. “We wanted to create something that was totally different from anything you can get now,” Vow founder Tim Noakesmith told Reuters. “Its protein is literally 4,000 years old. We haven’t seen it in a very long time. That means we want to put it through rigorous tests, something that we would do with any product we bring to the market.” Vow’s team used sheep cells as a base f...

The better to kiss you with? The Tyrannosaurus rex may have had scaly lips that covered their teeth.  Researchers said depictions of the predator with giant flashing teeth, fully visible, might be incorrect.  In a study published Thursday in the journal Science, paleontologists compared skulls and living reptiles.  Their findings distorted the image of the classic “Jurassic Park” series, finding that the teeth on the T. rex and other big theropods were likely covered by the lips. The teeth did not stick out when its mouth was closed, with just lips visible even in a wide open bite.  BIGGEST PENGUIN IN HISTORY WAS ‘MONSTER BIRD,’ WEIGHED OVER 300 POUNDS This illustration provided by Mark P. Witton in March 2023 depicts a juvenile Edmontosaurus being eaten by ...

Astronomers in the U.K. have discovered one of the largest black holes ever found.  The team, led by Durham University, used gravitational lensing to find the ultramassive black hole.  Gravitational lensing occurs when a celestial object has such a massive gravitational pull that it warps time and space around it, bending the light from a more distant object and magnifying it.  They also used supercomputer simulation on the DiRAC integrated supercomputing facility, enabling researchers to examine how light is bent by a black hole inside a galaxy located hundreds of millions of light-years away.  WEBB TELESCOPE CAPTURES WARPED SPACE, GALAXIES BILLIONS OF LIGHT-YEARS AWAY An artist’s impression of a black hole, where the black hole’s intense gravitational field distorts the space aro...

A massive 13-foot, 1,437-pound great white shark was detected off the coast of North Carolina this week as it makes its annual voyage north for the summer months.  Breton, which the marine science non-profit OCEARCH first started tracking in September 2020, pinged near Cape Hatteras in the Outer Banks on Tuesday morning.  The research group has been tracking the shark since tagging it off the coast of Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia two-and-a-half years ago.  Breton was in almost the same exact spot this time last year. The shark made a trip around Bermuda last May, traveled to Canada’s Gulf of St. Lawrence for last year’s summer months, then looped southward to the Bahamas in the fall before traveling up the East Coast again to the Outer Banks.  The adult great white is ...

Scientists have discovered a new and renewable source of water on the moon in samples from a Chinese lunar mission.  Water was found in tiny glass beads in the lunar dirt where violent meteorite impacts occur. The beads are the width of just hairs, and the water was a small fraction of that. The samples were returned from the moon in 2020, including 32 glass beads that were randomly picked from lunar dirt from the robotic Chang’e-5 mission. WEBB SPACE TELESCOPE CAPTURES DUST STORM ON REMOTE PLANET A screen shows footage of spacecraft for Chang’e-5 Mission, during an event on China’s lunar exploration program, at the National Astronomical Observatories of Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), in Beijing, China, January 18, 2021.  (REUTERS/Tingshu Wang/File Photo) Mining ...

People living in at least a half-dozen states could see the shimmering and surprising display of the Northern Lights between Thursday and Friday. Individuals in Arkansas, Montana, Wyoming, Minnesota, Wisconsin, South Dakota, North Dakota and New York took to social media to show the beautiful multicolor glow of the aurora borealis. The National Weather Service confirmed that over a half-dozen states along the northern tier of the U.S. could see the stunning display of the lights, visible to the naked eye. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center’s aurora forecast cited “stronger than anticipated” influences and issued a geomagnetic storm watch until Saturday. NASA SEES ACTIVE VENUS VOLCANO FOR FIRST TIME EVER The watc...