Washington: After making a historic Pluto flyby last July and now in deep space, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has twice observed a first object in Kuiper Belt - a region of the solar system beyond the orbit of Neptune."1994 JR1"…

Washington: NASA has deployed a bread loaf-sized Miniature X-Ray Solar Spectrometer (MinXSS) CubeSat from an airlock on the International Space Station (ISS) to study the Sun's soft x-rays that can affect our communications systems.Soft X-rays can disrupt the Earth's upper…

Melbourne: Using space dust, researchers from Monash University here have made a surprising discovery about the chemistry of Earth's atmosphere 2.7 billion years ago, thus challenging the accepted view that Earth's ancient atmosphere was oxygen-poor.The ancient Earth's upper atmosphere contained…

New York: A faint blue galaxy situated about 30 million light years from the Earth and located in the constellation "Leo Minor" can shed new light on birth of the universe.Astronomers from Indiana University (IU) found that a galaxy nicknamed…

Washington: NASA's Kepler mission has verified 1,284 new planets - the single largest finding of planets to date - giving fresh hopes to astronomers to discover another Earth reverberating with life.Scientists from Princeton University and NASA confirmed that 1,284 objects…

New Delhi: Marking a rare astronomical event -- the Mercury transit, the planet Mercury crossing in front of the Sun, will be visible in India on Monday from 4.43 p.m. till sunset at 7.01 p.m. in Delhi."This is a rare…

Washington: Scientists have detected atomic oxygen in the Martian atmosphere for the first time since the last observation 40 years ago.Atomic oxygen -- an elemental form of oxygen that does not exist in Earth's atmosphere -- affects how other gases…

New York: A team of astronomers has for the first time derived a highly precise measurement of the mass of a black hole -- calculating its mass to be 660 million times greater than that of the Sun.Working with high-resolution…

Washington: NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has sent first-ever data about Pluto's four moons that shows that the surface of Hydra is dominated by nearly pristine water ice.The Hydra spectrum is similar to that of Pluto's largest moon, Charon, which is…

Washington: Pluto behaves less like a comet than expected and somewhat more like a planet like Mars or Venus in the way it interacts with the solar wind -- a continuous stream of charged particles from the Sun, a first…