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After NASA's New Horizons spacecraft collected a trove of data from its six-month-long flyby of Pluto, it set its sights on a much smaller object in the Kuiper Belt -- an object dubbed 2014 MU69. Scientists believe MU69 will likely be a rather preserved outer solar system object, one that could provide clues as to how dwarf planets like Pluto may have formed billions of years ago. Now the New Horizons team reports that it has snapped a picture of its distance target and it did so weeks before MU69 was expected to be visible to the spacecraft. New...

Forget deflecting asteroids from hitting Earth—some engineers are drawing up a strategy to steer asteroids toward us, so our atmosphere can act as a giant catching mitt for resource-rich space rocks. What might sound like a crazy idea is actually quite business savvy, according to Minghu Tan, a Ph.D. student at the University of Glasgow in the United Kingdom who co-authored the new study. That’s because such near-Earth asteroids can host supplies, such as water and precious metals, that could support future human missions to space. But other scientists are skeptical that the concept will ever get off the ground....

More than 200 people across Missouri and seven other states spotted a fireball meteor last night light as it lit up the Midwestern sky, KMOV reports. The American Meteor Society posted observer accounts and several videos of the sighting to its website Tuesday. "It was super bright..." said Lisa B. in Ellisville, Missouri, who filed a report with the group. "We said, what IS that?!? Omg it's a fireball, I have to get my camera. Then tried to open my camera and the trail was all that was left." Some observers said the meteor appeared to break up into several...

The newly-discovered object, BST1047+1156, is part of a collection of about 24 galaxies called the Leo I group (also known as the M96 group). “It was so faint he hardly saw it. But I flagged it for Case Western Reserve University’s Professor Chris Mihos, with whom I’d been working the past two weeks, and explored the coordinates further,” Carr said.“What we found pointed to the detection of a new galaxy about 37 million light-years away.”BST1047+1156 has a radius of about 6,500 light-years and is approximately 3 billion years old.The object has two tidal tails and is found embedded within diffuse...

Earth is set for another spooky encounter with a 700 metre asteroid that looks uncannily like a skull. The space rock first passed ‘close’ to our planet at 78,000mph (125,500km/h) at a distance of 310,000 miles (499,000km) on October 31, 2015, just in time for Halloween. Now, it’s set to make a return in November 2018. This fall, the space rock, known as 2015 TB145, will flyby at a less dramatic distance than the last one. The asteroid will zoom past the planet at about 105 Earth-moon distances, compared to just under 1.3 lunar distances last time around. Astronomers analysing...

Well made YouTube video on the relationship of Immanuel Velikovsky and the Electric Universe. Velikovsky, Hero or Villain? Plasma Cosmology Astronomy Many of the predictions made by Velikovsky have proven true... while the traditional astronomers and cosmologists are repeatedly surprised by the findings.

Giacobini-Zinner’s return in 2018 is a promising one as it passes the Earth at a distance of 0.39 au. In June, 2018, 21p will be observable from modest sized telescopes sitting in the constellation of Cygnus reaching a brightness of magnitude 11 by month end. Although for many in the northern hemisphere, the sky will not reach true astronomical darkness all month. Between 17-21 June, the comet will skim past the ‘Mexico’ region of the North America nebula making for a nice widefield shot for photographers (again battling the twilight). The comet will then brighten rapidly through July and August by which time...

After inspecting asteroid Ryugu for two months, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has revealed the sites where the Hayabusa2 spacecraft will touchdown to collect a sample to bring back to Earth—and also where it will drop the first two of its planned landing probes. … Hayabusa2 is the follow-up mission to Hayabusa, a probe that was the first to collect samples from an asteroid and bring them back to Earth in 2010.... Since then, Hayabusa2 has been hovering a few tens of kilometres above the space rock and scanning its surface as it revolves every seven-and-a-half hours. The spacecraft...

The space agency said the 2016 NF23 is hurtling rapidly at a speed of around 20,000mph. At that speed, it is around 15 times faster than the 1,354mph the retired Concorde travelled at. The 2016 NF23 also measures up to a jaw-dropping 160metres. At that size, it is bigger than the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt which measures 139m. It is listed on NASA's Earth Close Approaches page, despite whizzing by at a distance of 3million miles away. But in space terms, it is considered close enough that it will pay attention to it. At 160m, it is considered...

The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft began its final approach toward the big near-Earth asteroid Bennu on Friday (Aug. 17), NASA officials said. The milestone also marks the official start of OSIRIS-REx's "asteroid operations" mission phase, they added. OSIRIS-REx is still about 1.2 million miles (2 million kilometers) from Bennu and won't arrive in orbit around the 1,650-foot-wide (500 meters) space rock until Dec. 3. The $800 million OSIRIS-REx mission — whose name is short for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer — launched on Sept. 8, 2016, from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. If all goes according to...

Scientists say the 'skyglows' represent an entirely new celestial phenomenon Scientists began studying mysterious ribbons of light dubbed 'Steve' in 2016 While they were thought to be auroras, study shows they form differently Experts now say they're a distinct phenomenon that was previously unknown Mysterious purple and white ribbons of light seen dancing across the sky may represent a never-before-identified type of ‘skyglow.’ While amateur photographers have been documenting the phenomenon for decades, scientists only began to study it back in 2016. Initial research suggested the lights, which have come to be known as STEVE, may be a type of...

It's been nearly a century since scientists first theorized that the Universe was expanding, and that the farther away a galaxy was from us, the faster it appears to recede. This isn't because galaxies are physically moving away from us, but rather because the Universe is full of gravitationally-bound objects, and the fabric of space that those objects reside in is expanding. But this picture, which held sway from the 1920s onward, has been recently revised. It's been only 20 years since we first realized that this expansion was speeding up, and that as time goes on, individual galaxies will...

The German government has “no plans or protocol” should first contact with aliens occur, according to a report by German daily Bild. The government considers such an event “extremely unlikely according to current scientific knowledge,” the Ministry of Economics said when responding to a question from Green MP Dieter Janecek. “Concrete cases that could have been the subject of bilateral or multilateral talks with other states are not known,” the ministry’s statement continued. While Germany might not have a plan for extraterrestrial visitors, the US is more prepared. Even before the establishment of a Space Force that US President Donald...

Scientists have shown that water is likely to be a major component of those exoplanets (planets orbiting other stars) which are between two to four times the size of Earth. It will have implications for the search of life in our Galaxy. The work is presented at the Goldschmidt Conference in Boston. The 1992 discovery of exoplanets orbiting other stars has sparked interest in understanding the composition of these planets to determine, among other goals, whether they are suitable for the development of life. Now a new evaluation of data from the exoplanet-hunting Kepler Space Telescope and the Gaia mission...

NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center says numerous people saw a very bright streak early Friday. A statement and video posted on Facebook says an analysis shows the meteor was first seen at an altitude of about 58 miles (93 kilometers) above rural Turkeytown, which is about 80 miles (129 kilometers) northeast of Birmingham. The office estimates a small asteroid about 6 feet (1.8 meters) in diameter then broke apart about 18 miles (29 kilometers) above the town of Oak Grove. It was at least 40 times as bright as the full moon at one point.

MIT scientists have uncovered a sprawling new galaxy cluster hiding in plain sight. The cluster, which sits a mere 2.4 billion light years from Earth, is made up of hundreds of individual galaxies and surrounds an extremely active supermassive black hole, or quasar. The central quasar goes by the name PKS1353-341 and is intensely bright — so bright that for decades astronomers observing it in the night sky have assumed that the quasar was quite alone in its corner of the universe, shining out as a solitary light source from the center of a single galaxy. But as the MIT...

“Deep Space of the Cosmos” –There’s a Mysterious Energy Latent In It Which Can Tell Us About Our Fate  Posted on Aug 15, 2018 “Empty space seems to be nothing to us. By analogy, water may seem to be nothing to a fish – it’s what’s left when you take away all the other things floating in the sea. Likewise, empty space is conjectured to be quite complicated,” Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal and Emeritus Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics at the University of Cambridge.Philosophers have debated the nature of “nothing” for thousands of years, but what has modern science got...

UNSW scientists have shown -- for the first time -- that a series of high-profile burial sites in the Pacific, Mediterranean and northern Scotland were likely related to catastrophic tsunamis... Honorary Professor James Goff from the PANGEA Research Centre at UNSW Sydney, who co-authored the paper, says the research provides new insights into past human-environment interactions and a new perspective on past catastrophic events... The researchers looked at coastal mass burial sites in the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu as well as in Orkney and Shetland. The mass graves cover a long timeframe of human history -- they are from about...

A supermassive black hole has been found at the center of a tiny galaxy, a rare find. What makes the discovery even more unique is that it has been located in an ultracompact dwarf galaxy, stunning researchers. The findings, published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, note that the galaxy Fornax UCD3 is part of a set called ultracompact dwarfs (UCDs), a very rare set of galaxies. "We have discovered a supermassive black hole in the center of Fornax UCD3," said the study's lead author, Anton Afanasiev, in a statement. "The black hole mass is 3.5 million...

...But Keller doesn’t buy any of it. “It’s like a fairy tale: ‘Big rock from sky hits the dinosaurs, and boom they go.’ And it has all the aspects of a really nice story,” she said. “It’s just not true.” ...Keller’s resistance has put her at the core of one of the most rancorous and longest-running controversies in science. “It’s like the Thirty Years’ War,” says Kirk Johnson, the director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. Impacters’ case-closed confidence belies decades of vicious infighting, with the two sides trading accusations of slander, sabotage, threats, discrimination, spurious data, and...