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50 years ago, astronauts orbited the moon for the first time
Apollo 8: Options on the way
Just two months after the end of the successful first manned Apollo flight ... three astronauts are ready to fly this Saturday to within 70 miles of the lunar surface.... The Apollo 8 plan is for the astronauts to fly as many as 10 orbits around the moon before heading home. — Science News, December 21, 1968
UpdateApollo 8 launched on December 21...
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Year in Review
2018 was a busy year in space
Several new space probes got their starts in 2018, while some sang swan songs.
Hello1. TESS is on the lookout for planets
There’s a new planet hunter in town. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, launched April 18 to search the nearest, brightest stars in the sky for signs of orbiting planets.
TESS has already spotted at least two new worlds, one of which may...
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Year in Review
These 2018 findings could be big news — if they turn out to be true
Here’s our short list of discoveries reported in 2018 that could shake up science, if they hold up.
Not so standardDangling from a helium balloon high above Antarctica, the ANITA detector spied two odd signals that hint at the existence of new subatomic particles. Such extremely energetic particles, if they exist, could upend the standard model, the theory that describes the elementary...
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News
Bennu and Ryugu look like spinning tops and scientists want to know why
WASHINGTON — New up-close images of Bennu have confirmed that the asteroid is shaped like a spinning top. That look, characterized by a raised equatorial ridge, is shared by other similarly sized asteroids in the solar system including Ryugu, currently being explored by Japan’s Hayabusa2 spacecraft (SN Online: 6/27/18). NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft arrived at Bennu on December 3 (SN Online: 12...
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Year in Review
Neutrino discovery launched a new type of astronomy
Mysterious particles called neutrinos constantly barrel down on Earth from space. No one has known where, exactly, the highest-energy neutrinos come from. This year, scientists finally put a finger on one likely source: a brilliant cosmic beacon called a blazar. The discovery could kick-start a new field of astronomy that combines information gleaned from neutrinos and light.
It...
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News in Brief
The Parker Solar Probe takes its first up-close look at the sun
NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has met the sun and lived to tell the tale.
The sun-grazing spacecraft has already broken the records for the fastest space probe and the nearest brush any spacecraft has made with the sun. Now the probe is sending data back from its close solar encounter, scientists reported December 12 at the American Geophysical Union meeting in Washington, D.C.
“What...
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News
Astronomers find far-flung wind from a black hole in the universe’s first light
Scientists have spotted wind from a supermassive black hole blowing at much greater distances than ever before.
Astronomer Mark Lacy and colleagues used the Atacama Large Millimeter Array in Chile to observe the universe’s first light, and found evidence of gusts flowing from a type of black hole called a quasar. The wind extends about 228,000 light-years away from the galaxy that...
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Letters to the Editor
Readers inquire about a Neptune-sized moon, nuclear pasta and more
Exomoonmoon12/05/2018 - 05:00 Physics, Astronomy, AnimalsA sighting by the Hubble Space Telescope provides more evidence that there’s a Neptune-sized moon, dubbed Neptmoon, orbiting the exoplanet Kepler 1625b, Lisa Grossman reported in “Hubble may have spotted the first known exomoon” (SN: 10/27/18, p. 14).
“If Neptmoon actually exists, could it possibly have moons of its own?” online reader MAdScientist72 asked. “And what...
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News
Scientists’ collection of gravitational waves just got a lot bigger
Astronomers have now tallied up more gravitational wave sightings than they can count on their fingers.
Scientists with the LIGO and Virgo gravitational wave observatories report four new sets of these ripples in spacetime. Those additions bring the total count to 11, the researchers say in a study published December 3 at arXiv.org, marking major progress since the first gravitational...
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News
Astronomers have measured all the starlight ever emitted
Astronomers have measured all the starlight that has managed to escape into space over the history of the universe.
It amounts to 4 x 1084 particles of light, or photons. That’s roughly equivalent to all the photons the sun would emit if it burned for 100 billion trillion years — long beyond the 5 billion years it has left. The universe itself is only 13.7 billion years old.
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