A menagerie of strange divots (NASA/HiRISE/Univ. of Arizona) As 2011 draws to a close, it’s time to reflect on my absenteeism from Astroengine. But it’s not my fault, I’ve been typing like a madman for these guys. But that’s enough excuses, 2012 promises to be a huge year for...

Some galaxies undergo a rapid star formation phase, losing stellar gases to intergalactic space, others choose to recycle, thereby extending their star forming lifespans (NASA, ESA, and A. Feild (STScI)) It sounds like an over-hyped public service announcement: If you don’t recycle, you’ll...

"That's no sunspot." Assuming Star Trek‘s Borg Collective went into overdrive and decided to build a huge cube a few thousand miles wide, then yes, the exoplanet-hunting Kepler space telescope should be able to spot it. But how could Kepler distinguish a cube from a nice spherical...

"Dad?" A scene from War of the Worlds. This rather outlandish, sci-fi notion comes straight from the fertile minds of researchers from MIT, the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard University who are proposing a biology experiment that could be sent on a future Mars surface mission....

UPDATE (Mon. 9:50 a.m. PT): Shocker. NASA refutes Hoover’s claims. Apparently his paper failed peer review for publication in the International Journal of Astrobiology… in 2007! More here: “NASA Refutes Alien Discovery Claim — Discovery News” Original post: On Saturday,...

I join FOX News host Megyn Kelly (center) and astrologer Constance Stella (right) on America Live. Today’s horoscope says: Expect some angry emails. Early this morning I get the call from Lori, my Director at Discovery News, saying, “You’re appearing on FOX this morning!” My...

The black hole lurking inside galaxy M87 has a mass of 6.6 billion suns, according to today's announcement (NASA) Fresh from the Department Of I Really Shouldn’t Have Eaten That Last Binary, astronomers attending the American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle, Wash., have announced a supermassive...

Solar spicules as imaged by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (NASA) There’s one recurring question I’ve been asking for nearly a decade: Why is the Sun’s corona (its atmosphere) so hot? When asking this out loud I inevitably get the sarcastic “um, because the Sun is…...

Are those Martian fossils in meteorite ALH84001? (NASA) “Panspermia” is a hypothesis that life is transferred from planet-to-planet and star system-to-star system through some interplanetary or interstellar means. But for panspermia to work, this life needs to be sufficiently protected...

Solar Dynamics Observatory view of the solar disk shortly after eruption (NASA). This morning, at 08:55 UT, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) detected a C3-class flare erupt inside a sunspot cluster. 100,000 kilometers away, deep within the solar atmosphere (the corona), an extended magnetic...