In 1619, German astronomer Johannes Kepler published his Harmonices Mundi (Harmony of the World), a text that investigated how mathematics could help the planets of the solar system create celestial music based on their orbital resonances. Three hundred years later, an astronomer using discoveries from NASA’s Kepler mission […]
Astronomers have detected water vapor in the atmosphere of a planet that orbits within the habitable zone of its star. “This is the only planet we know of outside the solar system that [has] the correct temperature to support water, has an atmosphere, and […]
/> If we look past Saturn’s rings, we see that the planet’s surface has few distinctive features. Most of the planet is made of hydrogen, helium, and such trace elements as ammonia, methane, and water, which create the planet’s visible bands and clouds. Occasionally, […]
/> A storm surge is a mound of water produced when a hurricane moves across a large body of water. Driving wind “pushes” the water so quickly that it “piles up” on the water in front of it, producing a mound of water that […]
The Danakil Depression is a rift valley that parallels the Red Sea, near the border between Ethiopia and Eritrea. It is a minor structure related to the rift between Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. As the rift opens, the floor of the Danakil Depression […]
/> Scientists are hailing the discovery of the thigh bone of a giant dinosaur, unearthed this week in France, as a “major discovery”. The two-metre-long femur was found by French palaeontologists at an excavation site in the southwest of the country where remains of […]
NASA navigators are helping build a future where spacecraft could safely and autonomously fly themselves to destinations like the Moon and Mars. Navigators today tell a spacecraft where to go by calculating its position from Earth and sending the location data to space in […]
