Stories from Payload’s weekly space science newsletter, Parallax.
For the first time ever, researchers have detected seismic waves on the surface of another celestial body. On December 24, 2021, scientists working on the Marsquake Service at ETH Zurich recorded the unexpected quake using the seismometer on NASA’s InSight lander. Unlike the deep-seated rumblings kilometers below the surface they’d observed over the past three […]
For millennia, humanity has been gazing up toward the stars, trying to make sense of the glittering madness. Hipparchus, a Greek astronomer who lived about 2,100 years ago, is credited not only with creating trigonometry, but also with assigning the first numerical coordinates to stars. The fabled star catalog itself was lost to the ages. […]
Has Einstein ever been wrong? A study published yesterday in Nature revealed the first direct observation of a phenomenon that the famed physicist described in his theory of general relativity. In a mid-collision pair of black holes, the Cardiff University researchers found the strongest evidence yet of a wobbling orbit caused by the distortion of […]
Each year, seawater in the Arctic freezes, melts, and re-freezes with the changing of the seasons. And each year, brave researchers trek out into the cold to stick poles into the snow and float buoys on the sea to measure just how thick that ice is. Why not just measure the ice thickness with satellites? […]
NASA’s Perseverance rover is currently trekking through an ancient river delta on the Red Planet, searching for signs of life. As it journeys through the great rocky wasteland, here and there, the rover is taking small samples of Mars rocks a few centimeters deep and storing them in little metal tubes. But our favorite little […]
This is the way a galaxy dies. Not with a bang but a whimper. Or, at least, that’s the case for a galaxy identified in a paper released last week. The study challenges the conventional wisdom that galaxy death—which happens when galaxies stop forming new stars—occurs alongside major cosmic events like supernovae or black hole […]
