By: Alfredo Carpineti/IFLScience In a groundbreaking series of observations, astronomers have used radio waves to observe two supermassive black holes orbiting around each other. This discovery, combined with the observations of gravitational waves from LIGO, are opening up a completely new avenue in black hole studies. The team used the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) to study galaxy…
SpaceX Just Transformed Space Flight, Launching Two Rockets in 48 Hours Success!
By: Dom Galeon/Futurism Elon Musk’s SpaceX took a scheduling delay and turned it into a historic opportunity: as the result of postponing the launch of a Bulgarian satellite from Monday to Friday of last week, SpaceX had two Falcon 9 rocket launches within 48 hours of each other. Friday’s BulgariaSat-1 launch happened from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The second…
The First “Space Nation” Wants You To Live On Their Orbital Space Station
By: Jonathan O’ Callaghan /IFLScience Asgardia, a rather unusual attempt to start a nation in space has announced it wants to eventually build a space station in Earth orbit and on the Moon. That somewhat lofty goal was revealed at a press conference in Hong Kong today. Here, Asgardia also unveiled its plans to launch its first satellite,…
Gravitational Waves Observed For A Third Time
By: Alfredo Carpineti/IFL Science A LIGO and Virgo collaboration have announced a new detection of gravitational waves, which was observed on January 4, 2017, by the two Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) detectors in Washington and Louisiana. As reported in Physical Review Letters, the event was a black hole merger that created a single black hole with a mass 49…
New Evidence Reveals Black Hole Event Horizons Are All Too Real
By: Peter Dockrill/Science Alert Scientists have found new evidence to support the idea that matter vanishes completely when it falls into a supermassive black hole, suggesting Einstein was right about these unquenchable voids lurking throughout the Universe. The findings show that black hole event horizons – the invisible barriers beyond which nothing can escape the intense pull…
NASA’s Juno Spacecraft Just Shattered What We Knew About Jupiter
By: Gemma Conroy/Science Alert Just when we thought we had Jupiter all figured out, NASA’s Juno spacecraft reveals new results that challenge almost every assumption we’ve made about the gas giant. The first said Juno’s principal investigator said Juno’s principal investigator from Juno’s initial two flybys back in August 2016 describe giant cyclones, a super powerful magnetic…
For The First Time, Physicists Have Observed A Giant Magnetic ‘Bridge’ Between Galaxies
By: Fiona Macdonald/Science Alert For the first time, scientists have detected evidence of a magnetic field that’s associated with the vast intergalactic ‘bridge’ that links our two nearest galactic neighbors. Known as the Magellanic Bridge, the bridge is a huge stream of neutral gas that stretches some 75,000 light-years between our two neighboring galaxies, the Large…
NASA Has Detected Hundreds of Unexpected Flashes Reflecting Off Our Planet
By: Bec Crew/Science Alert Hundreds of large flashes have been filmed reflecting off our planet, and they’ve helped NASA solve a mystery that stumped the likes of Carl Sagan more than two decades ago. These flashes are so large, you can see them from space, and they were originally thought to be caused by sunlight reflecting…
It’s Official. Humans Are Going To Mars. NASA Has Unveiled Their Mission.
By: Karla Lant/Futurism Though the undertaking will no doubt include many challenges, NASA is finally ready to make humanity’s dream of sending people to Mars a reality. To that end, the agency has shared its five-part plan for reaching the Red Planet. THE MARS MISSION Humanity has been fascinated by Mars since long before we stepped…