Space

Humanity has a new tool in the fight against space junk — “Space Armor™,” a multi-functional composite that could protect both spacecraft and astronauts. Space Armor is made via a proprietary fiber-to-resin manufacturing method courtesy of the company Atomic-6, which is based in Marietta, Georgia. “Satellites and astronauts are constantly threatened by millions of…

A weak region in Earth’s magnetic field has grown by an area roughly half the size of continental Europe in the last 10 years. That’s according to data collected by the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Swarm satellite constellation over the last 11 years. Swarm has been monitoring a region known as the South Atlantic Anomaly since 2014, and scientists have just published a new study…

If you think you’ve met the wildest exoplanet yet, you haven’t learned about TOI-4507 b. This strange world, which sits about 578 light-years from the solar system, breaks almost every known rule for how planets should behave. First off, it orbits a very young star that’s just 700 million years old, making it one of the youngest planetary systems ever discovered. The planet is 9x…

Get ready stargazers! The Orionid meteor shower peaks next week overnight on Oct. 20-21, bringing with it a flurry of spectacular ‘shooting stars’ to brighten a blissfully dark moonless sky. The Orionid meteor shower is active from Oct. 2 to Nov. 7. It occurs when Earth barrels through the trail of debris shed by Halley’s Comet as it makes its 76-year orbital tour of the solar…