The largest type of black holes — called supermassive black holes — have masses of the order of hundreds of thousands to billions of times the mass of the Sun. The mass of our Sun is 1.989 x 1030 kilograms, approximately 333,000 times...
Planet X is a hypothetical planet that is located about 400 astronomical units (AU) away. It may take up to 20,000 Earth years to complete one full orbit around our Sun. The planet has not yet been observed, but mathematical calculations suggest...
What exactly is a galaxy? In simple words, a galaxy is a system of stars, stellar remnants, and other celestial objects, bound together by gravitational force. Galaxies can differ in shape, size and each revolve around their center of mass. Our...
The world’s first human-made satellite, Sputnik-1, was launched by the Soviets in 1957. Since then, more than almost 9,000 satellites have been launched into space by nearly 40 different nations. For decades, government and private space...
To gain new insight, astronomers plan to observe a spiral galaxy that hosts a supermassive black hole at its center. They will gather the data through NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, which is set to be launched in 2021. By evaluating...
Do you believe in the existence of extraterrestrial beings? If you do, then you must be intrigued about their whereabouts and why we haven’t heard for them yet? It’s not just you, the question has troubled scientists and astrophysicists...
SpaceX vehicles are powered by dual-core x86 processors. In addition to the Linux operating system, they use LabView, a graphical programming tool that runs on Windows. Programmers at SpaceX prefer using C++ (and sometimes Python). The vehicle code...
According to the current planetary theory, the moon was created about 4.5 billion years ago after a massive collision between earth and a wandering celestial body, with a mass slightly less than that of Mars. The impact caused a chunk of debris to...
As per the latest measurement, our galaxy weighs in at approximately 1.5 trillion solar masses. This means the Milky Way has a mass of 2.98 x 1042 kilograms. Astronomers used ESA’s Gaia and NASA’s Hubble observations to obtain this...
Today, no matter where you are, you can access a plethora of space images right at your desktop and smartphone. Those colorful images of gigantic galaxies, nebulas, and mesmerizing gas clouds never fail to dazzle us. But does space really look like...
