Elisha Sauers

1 week ago | mashable.com | Elisha Sauers

Many reports following SpaceX’s ninth flight test for Starship on Tuesday emphasized disaster: The company’s massive rocket and uncrewed spacecraft exploded — again. But each demonstration has had specific objectives, and though Starship didn’t come close to acing them all this time, one in particular was a breakthrough toward making the rocket and ship reusable. That's a crucial goal for SpaceX, which hopes to use the ship to send people to the moon and Mars in a financially sustainable way.

1 week ago | in.mashable.com | Elisha Sauers

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1 week ago | me.mashable.com | Elisha Sauers

Jupiter, the largest planet orbiting the sun, used to be much bigger and stronger when the solar system was just beginning to take shape, a pair of astronomers say. Two scientists at Caltech and the University of Michigan suggest that early Jupiter was at least double its contemporary size. The primitive version of the gas giant could have held some 8,000 Earths within it, said Konstantin Batygin, lead author of the new study.

1 week ago | mashable.com | Elisha Sauers

When NASA's Hubble Space Telescope snapped a picture of an elliptical galaxy, it caught something else in the frame: A bright, red arc of light wrapped around it. That glowing curve isn't the sign of a broken telescope, but in fact another galaxy — about 19.5 billion light-years from Earth in space. It's much farther than the elliptical galaxy, seen as the central dot in the image at the top of this story, roughly 2.7 billion light-years away.

1 week ago | mashable.com | Elisha Sauers

Just when you thought you knew all the worlds in the solar system, astronomers go and discover a new object that could rewrite the space map. This icy world, temporarily named 2017 OF201, could be a distant cousin of Pluto — and scientists mean "distant" quite literally. At its farthest point, it's more than 1,600 times the distance of Earth from the sun. At its closest, it's still 44.5 times farther than Earth.