Most of the galaxy’s disk was in place before a major collision 10 billion years ago. Much of the Milky Way’s characteristic disk (seen edge-on in this image from the Gaia spacecraft) was already in place 10 billion years ago, when an interloper galaxy called Gaia-Enceladus/Sausage collided with it. Continue Reading
Chinese officials are hunting for an escaped leopard in the outskirts of Hangzhou, in eastern China, over three weeks after it escaped from a safari park. Hunters have used many methods to find the elusive big cat, including deploying a small army of drones and releasing around 100 live chickensContinue Reading
Second only to the U.S. in a fully successful Mars landing, China is now set to explore the Utopia Planitia region of the Red Planet’s surface. And then there were two: today China says it safely landed a spacecraft on Mars—for the first time in its history and in itsContinue Reading
On a geological timescale, the emergence of the human “dataome” is like a sudden invasion by extraterrestrials, or an asteroid impact that precipitates a mass extinction Something very old, very powerful and very special has been unleashed on Earth. Humans are strange. For a global species, we’re not particularly geneticallyContinue Reading
China conducted two launches of classified Yaogan satellites in the last week while much of the world waited to see where and when the Long March 5B would fall. A Long March 2C rocket lifted off from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in southwest China at 2:11 p.m. EDT ThursdayContinue Reading
It is one of the largest sturgeon ever caught in the U.S. Biologists just captured a scale-tipping 240-pound (109 kilograms) sturgeon measuring 6 feet 10 inches (2.1 meters) in length in the Detroit River in Michigan. The enormous fish, which is likely a female and could be more than 100Continue Reading
The technology lets people with paralysis perform thought dictation at rates approaching the thumb speeds of texters When we move, sense or speak—or do just about anything—our brain generates a specific pattern of electrical activity. And for decades, scientists have been connecting those impulses to machines, not only to understandContinue Reading
The unfortunate star was shredded to pieces. The black hole shreds the star into thin strands, which it wraps around itself like a ball of yarn. For the first time, astronomers have caught a glimpse of a star being “spaghettified” as a supermassive black hole rips it apart. AfterContinue Reading
Debris from the 20-metric-ton booster reportedly splashed down in the Indian Ocean north of the Maldives The Chinese rocket has come down. The 23-ton core stage of a Long March 5B booster crashed back to Earth Saturday night (May 8), ending 10 controversial days aloft that captured the attention ofContinue Reading
A new model cuts through the chaos to reach the best-yet predictions of complex gravitational interactions Physicists have spent centuries grappling with an inconvenient truth about nature: Faced with three stars on a collision course, astronomers could measure their locations and velocities in nanometers and milliseconds and it wouldn’t beContinue Reading