Space news stories

Much of the moon’s surface is 200 million years older than previously estimated, a new analysis suggests.

By marrying the existing expanding Universe theory with a fringe explanation called the tired light hypothesis, Gupta has found the Big Bang could have taken place an astonishing 26.7 billion years ago. That’s twice as old as current models predict. This research was published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Ancient stars born during the Cosmic Dawn have been identified in the center of the Milky Way. As part of a survey to uncover some of the oldest known stars in the Universe, scientists conducted a comprehensive search for these ancient but elusive stars. Their findings have been presented at the UK’s annual National Astronomy Meeting.

A large formation of granite discovered below the lunar surface likely was formed from the cooling of molten lava that fed a volcano or volcanoes that erupted early in the moon’s history—as long as 3.5 billion years ago.

Events appear to unfold five times slower when the universe was a tenth of its present age, in effect, predicted by Einstein.

A little more than 650 light-years from Earth, an old, red star lies dying. A fresh prognosis on Betelgeuse’s condition based on its pulsations gives the celebrated supergiant just a few decades before it collapses in a final flash of glory. This research is available on arXiv.

Our ideas about the universe are based on a century-old simplification known as the cosmological principle…In our recent review published in Classical and Quantum Gravity, we discuss how new discoveries force us to radically re-examine our assumptions and change our understanding of the universe.

Ravine-like channels on Mars are something of a puzzle. They look like the gullies in Antarctica caused by melting glaciers, but the elevated locations of many of the features aren’t places we’d expect to find recently flowing water. The research has been published in Science.

US space agency Nasa has ambitions to mine resources on the moon in the next decade, with the goal of excavating the soil there by 2032.

Beneath the explosions, collisions and other intermittent bangs in the cosmos, scientists suspect a nonstop soundtrack plays, created by ripples in spacetime continually washing through the universe. After more than a decade of searching, scientists may have finally heard that background hum. See the research here.

Star cluster M92, a densely packed ball of stars roughly 27,000 light-years from Earth, is about 13.8 billion years old, researchers report in a paper submitted June 3 to arXiv.org. The newly refined age estimate makes this clump of stars nearly the same age as the universe.

Claims the US government has secretly retrieved crashed alien spacecraft and their non-human occupants are hardly new…Now, however, journalists Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal have injected fresh vigor into these aging claims – apparently with the Pentagon’s approval.

An investigation into the mystery filaments hanging in space around the heart of the Milky Way has turned up an entirely new population of them, aligned along the galactic plane and pointing in the direction of the galactic center. See the research here.

Since what has come to be known as the Great Dimming that took place in the latter half of 2019 and early 2020, the red giant star Betelgeuse just will not stop with the wackiness.

A team of theoretical physicists have discovered a strange structure in space-time that to an outside observer would look exactly like a black hole, but upon closer inspection would be anything but: they would be defects in the very fabric of the universe. Read the paper here.

A ground-breaking study of ancient meteorites has provided the first evidence to suggest that Jupiter was once much closer to the sun before it shifted position.