ScienceDaily: Top Science News


President Biden reveals first image from NASA's Webb Telescope

Posted: 11 Jul 2022 04:47 PM PDT

The first full-color image from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope reveals thousands of galaxies, including the faintest objects ever observed in the infrared.

The ultimate fate of a star shredded by a black hole

Posted: 11 Jul 2022 11:32 AM PDT

In 2019, astronomers observed the nearest example to date of a star that was shredded, or 'spaghettified,' after approaching too close to a massive black hole. That tidal disruption of a sun-like star by a black hole 1 million times more massive than itself took place 215 million light years from Earth. Luckily, this was the first such event bright enough that astronomers could study the optical light from the stellar death, specifically the light's polarization, to learn more about what happened after the star was torn apart.

New insights about surface, structure of asteroid Bennu

Posted: 07 Jul 2022 11:24 AM PDT

When NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft collected samples from asteroid Bennu's surface in 2020, forces measured during the interaction provided scientists with a direct test of the poorly understood near-subsurface physical properties of rubble-pile asteroids. Now, a new study has characterized the layer just below the asteroid's surface as composed of weakly bound rock fragments containing twice the void space as the overall asteroid.