Space
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Mars missions update
Perseverance, Curiosity and a mole trying to dig.
NASA's Perseverance Mars rover is now attached to the top of the rocket that hopefully will send it towards the Red P...
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New views on the origins of carbon
White dwarfs found to have more mass than expected.
Every carbon atom in the Universe was created by stars, through the fusion of three helium nuclei, but which types of...
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Conversation
Looking for lithium? Look to the stars
They start producing it in their old age.
By Simon Campbell, Monash University and Yerra Bharat Kumar, Chinese Academy of Sciences Lithium is used in everyt...
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Why we love black holes
Big discoveries ramp up excitement and expectations.
In the pantheon of astronomical objects, black holes are among the most amazing. Not only do they swallow large am...
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Moon may be much more metallic
NASA radar suggests there are sub-surface riches.
The Moon might be more metallic than researchers thought. And that comes from no less a source than NASA. The scie...
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A chance to see a planet’s interior
Astronomers find surviving core of a gas giant.
Astronomers have discovered the surviving core of a gas giant orbiting a distant star, offering, they say, an unprece...
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Missing: a large and unstable blue star
Even the Very Large Telescope can’t find it now.
A massive and unstable star is missing from a dwarf galaxy, and astronomers are intrigued. It may just have become...
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Pōniuāʻena makes its mark far from Hawaii
It’s the second-most distant quasar ever detected.
The discovery of the second-most distant – and thus second oldest – quasar ever detected may force a rethink of how b...
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SOHO keeps on doing the business
It’s watching the Sun and finding comets. Lots of comets.
SOHO – the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory – doesn’t have quite the profile of the likes of Hubble and Spitzer, bu...
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History
Nancy Grace Roman had her eyes on the sky
NASA has honoured the ‘mother of the Hubble’.
Given her background, Nancy Grace Roman’s life could have gone a couple of ways. She was born on 16 May 1925 in Nashv...
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New super-Earths found close to home
Astronomers detect them orbiting a bright red dwarf.
Astronomers report detecting two, maybe even three, super-Earth exoplanets orbiting the brightest red dwarf star in t...
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Astrophysicists find the exoplanet they wanted
It’s the size of Neptune and orbiting a young star.
An exoplanet the size of Neptune has been discovered around a small young star about 32 light-years from Earth, endin...