News by Subject Space & Planetary

China, in collaboration with several countries, is now at the forefront of lunar exploration. In an article published on July 18 in Science, researchers laid out what the China Lunar Exploration Program (CLEP) has accomplished since their launch in 2007 and their plans into the next three decades.

The first direct measurement of the bar-shaped collection of stars at the centre of our Milky Way galaxy has been made by combining data from the Gaia mission (European Space Agency, ESA) with complementary observations by ground- and space-based telescopes. The study, published in Astronomy & Astrophysics, was led by researchers from the Institute of Science Cosmos of the University of Barcelona and from the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (Germany).

Astronomers have made a new measurement of how fast the universe is expanding, using an entirely different kind of star than previous endeavors. The revised measurement, from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, falls in the center of a hotly debated question in astrophysics that may lead to a new interpretation of the universe's fundamental properties.

A team of collaborators from Carnegie and the University of Chicago used red giant stars that were observed by the Hubble Space Telescope to make an entirely new measurement of how fast the universe is expanding, throwing their hats into the ring of a hotly contested debate. Their result -- which falls squarely between the two previous, competing values -- is published in The Astrophysical Journal.

A team at Purdue University has developed a new safer and inexpensive way to propel small satellites.

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign identified a critical hidden challenge about replacing the broken satellites in megaconstellations and proposed a unique solution with inventory control methods.

As if black holes weren't mysterious enough, astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have found an unexpected thin disk of material furiously whirling around a supermassive black hole at the heart of the magnificent spiral galaxy NGC 3147, located 130 million light-years away.

To date, 17 Chinese self-developed FengYun (FY) meteorological satellites have been launched, which are widely applied in weather analysis, numerical weather forecasting and climate prediction, as well as environment and disaster monitoring. Currently, seven satellites are in operation.

Supercomputer simulations of galaxies have shown that Einstein's theory of General Relativity might not be the only way to explain how gravity works or how galaxies form.