Life
Some germs ride a superhighway at the edge of space
Some microbes common on Earth’s surface lead a secret double life. Soaring higher than jumbo jets, they carry clues about disease spread and alien life.
By Douglas Fox
Space
More Stories in Space
- Artificial Intelligence
AI … in space!
In WALL-E, artificial intelligence runs an entire ship. Real-life AI, though, is too finicky and prone to mistakes to manage that.
- Space
Plasma whirlpools on the sun could trigger solar flares
The largest solar telescope in the world captured swirling plasma structures on the sun’s surface. Take a look.
- Space
This cosmic oddity blurs the line between planet and moon
The object orbits a brown dwarf that orbits a star. Astronomers aren’t sure if it’s a planet, a moon — or something else entirely.
- Space
Art helped this astrophysicist make sense of math
Ronald Gamble takes cues from the arts to study supermassive black holes and their spacetime geometry.
- Space
‘Superpuff‘ planets are as dense as cotton candy
The puffiest planets known in our galaxy orbit a sunlike star more than 1,000 light-years from Earth.
- Space
Scientists Say: Event horizon
Past this boundary, nothing that enters a black hole can ever leave — not even light.
- Earth
Analyze This: A rocket reentry spiked metal levels in the atmosphere
Detection of lithium from a SpaceX rocket reentering the atmosphere offers new evidence that space debris could harm the ozone layer.
- Earth
Scientists Say: Snow line
On Earth, this line marks the edge of snow-covered ground. In space, it marks a spot where a certain molecule might freeze.
- Earth
Could a storm last forever?
Thunderstorms help fix imbalances found in our atmosphere. For constant storms, those imbalances would have to persist.
