Astronomers say they have found a miniature version of our own solar system 5,000 light years across the galaxy — the first planetary system that really looks like our own, with outer giant planets and room for smaller inner planets.
The discovery, they said, means that our solar system might be more typical of planetary systems across the universe than had been thought.
Europe's shiny new $2 billion science lab, Columbus, was anchored to the international space station Monday by a team of astronauts laboring inside and out.
French astronaut Leopold Eyharts announced its arrival. "Beautiful work," radioed Mission Control.
It was an exhausting daylong affair that took more time than expected.
The grand finale was the actual attachment of the 23-foot, 14-ton lab during an exhausting daylong spacewalk by Rex Walheim and Stanley Love. The astronauts shouted and cheered when the lab reached its destination.
Space shuttle Atlantis docked with the international space station Saturday, delivering Europe's $2 billion research lab after years of delay.
With commander Stephen Frick at the helm, Atlantis slowly and carefully pulled up to the space station and latched on after performing a giant backflip to give NASA a look at the ship's thermal shield.
An asteroid that exploded over Siberia a century ago, leaving 800 square miles of scorched or blown down trees, wasn't nearly as large as previously thought, a researcher concludes, suggesting a greater danger for Earth.
According to supercomputer simulations by Sandia National Laboratories physicist Mark Boslough, the asteroid that destroyed the forest at Tunguska in Siberia in June 1908 had a blast force equivalent to one-quarter to one-third of the 10- to 20-megaton range scientists previously estimated.
While many executives see themselves as prodigious multitaskers -- checking e-mail while simultaneously talking on the phone, eyeing stock quotes, and performing all sorts of other busywork. But they're probably doing a lousy job if they're trying to focus on more than four things at once, a recent study maintains.
The possibility of a collision between Mars and an approaching asteroid has been effectively ruled out, according to scientists watching the space rock as it nears the Red Planet.
Tracking measurements of asteroid 2007 WD5 from four observatories have so greatly reduced uncertainties about its Jan. 30 close approach to Mars that the odds of an impact have dropped to 1 in 10,000, the Near-Earth Object Program at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said in a posting on its Web site Thursday.
Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico have found a way of using sunlight to recycle carbon dioxide and produce fuels like methanol or gasoline.
The Sunlight to Petrol, or S2P, project essentially reverses the combustion process, recovering the building blocks of hydrocarbons. They can then be used to synthesize liquid fuels like methanol or gasoline. Researchers said the technology already works and could help reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, although large-scale implementation could be a decade or more away.
The longest-running search for radio signals from alien civilizations is receiving 500 times more data from an upgraded telescope and better frequency coverage than project planners anticipated, meaning the SETI@home project is in dire need of more desktop computers to help crunch the data.
July 4th was a significant day long before America started celebrating it. It also marks the first time on record that a new object appeared in the constellation Taurus -- an object so bright it could be seen in the daytime sky.
Not surprisingly, people around the world couldn't help but take notice. Chinese astronomers labeled it a "guest star" and noted that, at night, it shone almost four times brighter than Venus. They soon began speculating that its appearance heralded the Emperor at the time, Jen Tsung.
A newly discovered hunk of space rock has a 1 in 75 chance of slamming into the red planet on January 30, scientists said Thursday.
"These odds are extremely unusual. We frequently work with really long odds when we track ... threatening asteroids," said Steve Chesley, an astronomer with the Near Earth Object Program at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
