Part of the Soyuz rocket that brought the latest trio of crew members to the International Space Station fell back to Earth on Dec. 24, and its fiery re-entry was captured by several skywatchers in Europe. This footage taken from Germany is the best view of it, and there’s another good view below. Some people mistakenly thought it was a comet; and since this lightshow occurred on Christmas Eve, there were a few who suggested it might be Santa flying across the fly. That would have been bad news, however, to see debris breaking off the sleigh…
Additionally, there are reports that debris from the failed Soyuz rocket that was supposed to send a communications satellite into orbit fell and hit a house in Siberia. An animation of that event is also posted below.
Can tidal forces cause an exoplanet’s surface to radiate heat? This is what a recent…
Untangling what happened in our Solar System tens or hundreds of millions of years ago…
Back in the 1960s and 1970s, Apollo astronauts set up a collection of lunar seismometers…
The dwarf planet Ceres has some permanently dark craters that hold ice. Astronomers thought the…
Cosmic rays are high-energy particles accelerated to extreme velocities approaching the speed of light. It…
NASA is in the business of launching things into orbit. But what goes up must…