TESS discovers its first Earth-sized planet
NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, TESS, has discovered its first Earth-sized exoplanet. The planet, named HD 21749c, is the smallest world outside our solar...
Astronomers take first, high-resolution look at huge star-forming region of Milky Way
Astronomers from the United States and South Korea have made the first high-resolution, radio telescope observations of the molecular clouds within a massive star-forming...
First direct images of a black hole
An international team of over 200 astronomers, including scientists from MIT’s Haystack Observatory, has captured the first direct images of a black hole. They...
Counting orangutans using star-spotting technology
Orangutans, like all great apes, build a sleeping nest in trees. Traditionally orangutan numbers are estimated by counting these nests from the ground. However,...
Astronomers find evidence of a planet with a mass almost 13 times that of...
In the past three decades, almost 4,000 planet-like objects have been discovered orbiting isolated stars outside the Solar System (exoplanets). Beginning in 2011, it...
Iron volcanoes may have erupted on metal asteroids
Metallic asteroids are thought to have started out as blobs of molten iron floating in space. As if that's not strange enough, scientists now...
URI researcher calculates temperature inside moon to help reveal its inner structure
Little is known about the inner structure of the Moon, but a major step forward was made by a University of Rhode Island scientist...
MIT and NASA engineers demonstrate a new kind of shape-changing airplane wing
Assembled from tiny identical pieces, the wing could enable lighter, more energy-efficient aircraft designs.
The new approach to wing construction could afford greater flexibility in...
Hubble spots flock of cosmic ducks
This star-studded image shows us a portion of Messier 11, an open star cluster in the southern constellation of Scutum (the Shield). Messier 11...
Dark matter experiment finds no evidence of axions
Physicists from MIT and elsewhere have performed the first run of a new experiment to detect axions — hypothetical particles that are predicted to...
