OUR UNIVERSE

In 2005, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft discovered that geysers blast water ice, organic molecules and other material into space from the south polar region of the Saturn moon Enceladus. Credit: NASA/JPL/SSI NASA's Cassini spacecraft has made its deepest dive yet through the plume emanating from the south pole of Saturn's icy moon Enceladus. Cassini flew low through the plume today (Oct. 28) at about 1 p.m. EDT (1700 GMT), zooming within a mere 30 miles (50 kilometers) of Enceladus' frigid surface, if all went according to plan. During the encounter, the spacecraft snapped photos and gathered samples that should help researchers learn more about the moon's life-hosting potential. (An ocean of liquid water sloshes beneath Enceladus' icy shell, and the plume material comes from this subsurface sea.) Enceladus has an extensive water ocean under its icy crust, feeding water jets that emerge from near the so...

It's easy to get lost in this jaw-dropping snapshot of the Eagle Nebula, which offers a high-resolution view of an incredible space landscape. The Eagle Nebula is a massive collection of gas and dust, which serves as fertile soil for the birth of new stars. The blue, lagoonlike region at the center of the image contains the iconic, fingerlike structures known as the Pillars of Creation. The blue, green and red indicate the presence of different gasses. The image was created by a collaboration of four astrophotographers, and is composed of 177 individual frames, with a total integration time of 32 hours. The group members are Terry Hancock of Michigan (whose sky images have been featured on Space.com many times before), Gordon Wright from Scotland, Colin Cooper, Spain; and Kim Quick, Florida. The full-size image is almost too much to take in all at once, so viewers are encouraged to zoom in and get lost in the details of this incredible snapshot. Pillars o...

Artist's illustration of NASA's Cassini spacecraft flying by Saturn's icy moon Enceladus. Cassini will make its deepest-ever dive through Enceladus' south polar plume on Wednesday (Oct. 28). Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech Scientists are about to get their best look ever at the ocean that sloshes beneath the surface of Saturn's icy moon Enceladus. On Wednesday (Oct. 28), NASA's Cassini spacecraft will zoom just 30 miles (50 kilometers) above Enceladus, flying through and sampling the plume of material that erupts from the satellite's south polar region. This plume is thought to originate from Enceladus' underground liquid-water ocean, so Cassini's onboard sample analysis should shed light on the moon's potential to host life, mission team members said.   Mission Video  "On Wednesday, we will plunge deeper into the magnificent plume coming from the south pole than we ever have before, and we will collect the best samples ever...

The Orionid meteor shower produced some amazing cosmic sights for stargazers, including two brilliant fireballs, despite a bright moon and predictions of a less-than-stellar show. NASA's all-sky fireball camera network captured video of the Orionid meteor shower fireballs produced when meteors slammed into Earth's atmosphere on Oct. 20. In total, the all-sky network detected 15 Orionid fireballs last night, according to SpaceWeather.com . "Forecasters expect the shower to peak on Oct. 21 with about 20 meteors per hour," officials from SpaceWeather.com wrote. "However, Halley's debris stream is broad, so Orionid activity could spill into Oct. 22nd. The best time to look is during the hours before local sunrise when the constellation Orion is high in the sky." [ See photos from the 2013 Orionid meteor shower ]

Astrophotographer BG Boyd captured this Orionid meteor shower several miles outside of Tucson, Arizona, in October 2014. Credit: BG Boyd/ www.bgboydphoto.com Even before the start of 2015, assiduous meteor observers were aware that this was going to be an excellent year for some of the best of the annual meteor displays. The August Perseids nearly coincided with a new moon, and the upcoming December Geminids will peak when the moon is just a narrow crescent in the early evening skies. Now, one of the more reliable meteor showers — sort of a junior version of the Perseids — is set to reach its maximum before sunrise on Thursday morning (Oct. 22). This upcoming display is known as the Orionids, because the meteors seem to fan out from a region to the north of the constellation Orion's second-brightest star, ruddy Betelgeuse. Currently, Orion appears to be ahead of Earth as the planet journeys around the sun, an...

Are We Alone, Really? NASA/JPL The race to find intelligent life, or any life at all, beyond Earth has been a heated space scramble for decades. Even though no concrete evidence of extraterrestrials has ever been confirmed, it seems like every space probe ever launched and scheduled to launch has a "FIND LIFE" stamped in its mission. That isn't to say we don't have our theories for where life might be hiding. Here, we take a look at some places we’ve explored, and some we haven't. Meteorites NASA There have been around 22,000 documented meteorite discoveries on Earth and many have been found to hold organic compounds. In 1996, a group of scientists announced they had spotted strong evidence of microfossils on a Martian meteorite found in Antarctica showing that life may have existed on the Red Planet some 3.6 billion years ago. After years of intense debate, the issue wheth...

Artist's impression of an impact event on Jupiter's moon Europa. Credit: NASA/JPL-CALTECH If alien life swims in the ocean beneath Europa's icy surface, it might have got its start from comets cracking the icy shell to deliver vital pre-life ingredients, say researchers. New simulations show that a specific family of comets have the mass, velocity and opportunity to do the job -- penetrating the full range of likely Europan ice thicknesses.   ANALYSIS: NASA's Europa Mission to Hunt Down Life's Niches "It's one of the best candidates for an ecosystem," said Rónadh Cox of Williams College, Mass., regarding Europa's ocean. "But how do you get biological precursers into the ocean?" To find out if icy, chemical-rich comets could do it, she and her team modeled impacts by the full range of comets that have been influenced by Jupiter, and brought into relatively short o...

An illustration suggests what an exoplanet may look like orbiting a star. Credit: ESA The fascinating speculation surrounding a recent Kepler observation of a star 1,500 light-years away has reignited questions of alien life in our universe and what it means for future studies. ANALYSIS: Has Kepler Discovered an Alien Megastructure? First I really want to emphasize, as I did in my previous blog about KIC 8462852 , that the root cause of a very strange Kepler transit signal is most likely due to natural phenomena . (A transit occurs when an exoplanet — or, in this case, something else — drifts in front of its star and Kepler detects a slight dimming of starlight.) After analyzing the unique transit signal identified as being "bizarre" by the Planet Hunters community , researchers did a thorough job identifying a possible mechanism by which significant and distinct dimming events could have been triggered. A...

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), NASA's youngest moon probe, has beamed home a treasure trove of data since its mission began in June 2009. Here's a look at 10 of LRO's most intriguing lunar discoveries so far.  LRO   The biggest revelation uncovered by researchers in recent years is the discovery of water on the moon, in ice and rocks, across huge craters and vast lunar plains. LRO helped discover the moon's hidden water by watching its partner probe LCROSS crash into the lunar surface in October 2009. LRO and other spacecraft ultimately found evidence of tons of water ice at the moon's north pole and elsewhere. Two Lunar Pits   LRO has now collected the most detailed images yet of at least two lunar pits, giant holes in the moon. Scientists believe these holes form when the ceiling of a subterranean lava tube collapses, possibly due to a meteorite strike. The image shows the Mare Ingenii pit, which surprisingly lies in an are...

This computer illustration depicts a collision between Earth’s moon and a companion moon that is 750 miles wide and about 4 percent of the lunar mass. This late, slow accretion could explain the moon's farside highlands, scientists say. Credit: Martin Jutzi and Erik Asphaug A tiny second moon may once have orbited Earth before catastrophically slamming into the other one, a titanic clash that could explain why the two sides of the surviving lunar satellite are so different from each other, a new study suggests. The second moon around Earth would have been about 750 miles (1,200 kilometers) wide and could have formed from the same collision between the planet and a Mars-sized object that scientists suspect helped create the moon we see in the sky today, astronomers said. The gravitational tug of war between the Earth and moon slowed the rate at which it whirls, such that it now always s...

Meteorites are typically sold by weight. The meteorite collecting community uses the metric system so weights are measured in grams and kilograms, and dimensions in centimeters and millimeters. As is the case with most collectibles, the commercial value of a meteorite is determined by a number of factors including rarity of type, provenance, condition of preservation, and beauty or aesthetic appeal. It is important to note that new and noteworthy meteorite finds should always be made available to the scientific community for study. Once a meteorite has been analyzed and classified by academia, surplus specimens find their way onto the commercial market. The process of acceptance into the official scientific literature actually adds commercial value to a meteorite. Meteorite prices vary from one source to another but the numbers quoted here are typical of retail values in today’s marketplace. Unclassified stone chondrites picked up by nomads wandering i...

Space is unbelievably strange. You would be forgiven for thinking that every planet out there is similar, just a big ball of rock and gas, but planets are remarkably more unique than that. Here's the top 10 strangest planets in the known universe, that seem like they belong in some bizarre science fiction series. 10. Gliese 581C : The Murder Planet Similar to other planets that are tidally-locked, Gliese 581C is forced to face one way as it orbits its red dwarf star. This means that the side facing the star is scorching hot while the dark side is constantly frozen. Nevertheless, scientists speculate that a portion of Gliese 581C is habitable – in fact, this planet is believed to be the best candidate for human expansion. Living on this surface would be reminiscent of hell, partially due to the fact that a red dwarf star bombards the planet with red and infrared light, leading to plants that would likely have to adapt to the flood of infrared ...

Dark narrow streaks called recurring slope lineae (RSL) emanate from the walls of Mars’ Garni crater in this image by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. These RSL are up to a few hundred meters in length. They are thought to be formed by the flow of salty liquid water.
                                                                                                                 Liquid water flows on Mars today, boosting the odds that life could exist on the Red Planet, a new study suggests. The enigmatic dark streaks on Mars — called recurring slope lineae (RSL) — that appear seasonally on steep, relatively warm Martian slopes are likely caused by salty liquid water, researchers sa...

  Enceladus Enceladus is the sixth-largest moon of Saturn. It is only 500 kilometers (310 mi) in diameter, about a tenth of that of Saturn's largest moon, Titan. Enceladus is mostly covered by fresh, clean ice, reflecting almost all the sunlight that strikes it and making its surface temperature at noon reach only −198 °C. Enceladus has a wide range of surface features, ranging from old, heavily cratered regions to young, tectonically deformed terrains that formed as recently as 100 million years ago, despite its small size. Enceladus was discovered in 1789 by William Herschel, but little was known about it until the two Voyager spacecraft passed nearby in the early 1980s. In 2005, the Cassini spacecraft started multiple close flybys of Enceladus, revealing its surface and environment in greater detail. In particular, Cassini discovered a water-rich plume venting from the south polar region of Enceladus. Cryovolcanoes near the south pole shoot geyser-...