News by Subject Space & Planetary

A team led by Southwest Research Institute has concluded that the surface of dwarf planet Ceres is rich in organic matter. Data from NASA's Dawn spacecraft indicate that Ceres's surface may contain several times the concentration of carbon than is present in the most carbon-rich, primitive meteorites found on Earth.

A team led by Southwest Research Institute has developed a new technique for looking at historic solar data to distinguish trustworthy observations from those that should be used with care. This work is critical to understanding the sun's past and future as well as whether solar activity plays a role in climate change.

Earth's atmosphere is leaking-but how does oxygen get the energy to escape to space? NASA's VISIONS-2 rocket will soon launch into the unique magnetic environment near the North Pole in pursuit of an answer.

A supernova discovered by an international group of astronomers including Carnegie's Tom Holoien andMaria Drout, and led by University of Hawaii's Ben Shappee, provides an unprecedented look at the first moments of a violent stellar explosion. The light from the explosion's first hours showed an unexpected pattern, which Carnegie's Anthony Piro analyzed to reveal that the genesis of these phenomena is even more mysterious than previously thought.

Analyzing data from NASA's Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission, a team led by Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) has found that the small regions in the Earth's magnetosphere that energize the polar aurora are remarkably calm and nonturbulent.

Researchers at the University of New Hampshire have captured a difficult-to-view singular event involving 'magnetic reconnection' -- the process by which sparse particles and energy around Earth collide producing a quick but mighty explosion -- in the Earth's magnetotail, the magnetic environment that trails behind the planet.

These images reveal the final stage of unions between pairs of galactic nuclei in the messy cores of colliding galaxies.

For the first time, a team of astronomers has observed several pairs of galaxies in the final stages of merging together into single, larger galaxies. Peering through thick walls of gas and dust surrounding the merging galaxies' messy cores, the research team captured pairs of supermassive black holes -- each of which once occupied the center of one of the two original smaller galaxies -- drawing closer together before they coalescence into one giant black hole.