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Ever since Donald Trump emerged in media as High Priest of Idiocracy, the very word “hoax” has received new fame. Global warming is a hoax generated by the Chinese. Democrats are hoaxes. And now according to the Flat Earth community, the recent launch of the Falcon Heavy from Cape Canaveral with Elon Musk’s own Tesla Roadster aboard was also a hoax of epic proportions. The Flat Earth community has gained a lot of following and it also includes some high-profile members. Kyrie Irving, the NBA superstar now a affiliate of the Boston Celtics, is also the one. After the SpaceX launch, Edwards whacked together a YouTube video called “FLAT EARTH PROOF (ELON MUSK SPACEX FALCON HEAVY WAS FAKE)!!!!” which postures numerous questions such as “Where the f*ck the satellites at?” and “Why ain’t it spinnin’?” Then there is this one which completely closes the deal: “Where the f*ck the stars at?” It’s tough to debate with thoughtful insights like that. The people at Vice also report that some famo...

We’ve become used to looking at unclear images of the Moon’s surface taken about 50 years ago, but the newest collection of photos issued by the Chinese space agency comprise some of the clearest pictures ever taken. These stunning pictures were taken by the Chinese Space Agency’s Yutu lunar rover.  Yutu lunar rover is also known as the “Jade Rabbit”. It landed on the Moon on 14 December 2013 as part of the Chang’e-3 Moon mission. Yutu captured photographs in stunning HD quality, displaying the rocky lunar surface, rover tracks and remarkable rock formations. The rover became motionless on 25 January 2014 – just 42 days into a three-month mission – due to technical glitches. The main problem was that it was unable to replenish its solar power supplies. Despite this problem, the Yutu’s tools continued to work, letting it to record data and take these astonishing pictures from a stationary position. Unlike NASA or the European Space Agency, the China National Space Administration...

It’s been hardly two weeks since Elon Musk’s SpaceX magnificently launched the first Falcon Heavy into orbit and also a red Tesla Roadster. Many of us are interested as to where it and its unconventional passenger are at the moment. Sending Tesla Roadster was a good decision and it was just a test flight. On board the car is a mannequin lovingly called “Starman.” Starman, who is outfitted in a SpaceX spacesuit, was apparently en route towards the orbit of Mars and then due to over thrust now towards the asteroid belt, to the song of David Bowie’s music. Musk has admitted that Starman’s route after launch had gone a little off from its planned path. And now it turns out, it might not have veered off that far as projected earlier. According to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory , which unconfined data as to the Roadster’s location. Now you can easily find out the exact location of the Roadster and Starman using NASA’s data, which engineer Ben Pearson has brilliantly put into a website cal...

👋 Wave hello to yourself! NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft captured this image of the Earth and Moon on January 17 from a distance of 39.5 million miles. It's been an incompatible few months on this blue dot of ours, but nothing puts life into perception like this amazing photo captured by a spacecraft literally millions of miles from us. Image Credit: NASA NASA’s OSIRIS-REx, an asteroid-sampling spacecraft, captured the image below as portion of an engineering test on January 17 2018. The probe was stirring away from us at about 8.5 km per second (19,000 miles per hour) when it captured the photo - snapping a minute Earth and Moon sitting together 63.6 million kilometers (39.5 million miles) away from us. In the photo, you can see Earth is the perky dot in the mid of the image, and the Moon is the minor dot to the right. But if you look a little closely, there's way much more to haze upon in the background. As NASA explains , "Several constellations are also visible in ...

Feast your eyes, my good curious friends, on this — by far the clearest image ever taken of a very young star and its newly formed protoplanetary disk. In this spectacular image you can see the young star HL Tau, which is just about one million years old. This image is truly a marvel of science. Around this star, dust and gas swirl, slowly developing into planets and asteroids. You may or may not believe it but a few billion years ago, this is precisely what our very own Solar System would’ve looked like. This amazing image was taken by ALMA. ALMA stands for the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array. It is a huge telescope consisting of 66 separate antennas, situated high up in the Atacama Desert in northern parts of Chile. ALMA is operated by the European Southern Observatory (ESO). According to ESO this image comes from some of the telescopes first observations in its “new and most powerful mode”. ALMA has been under construction for years, but only a few year ago, they h...

Researchers at NASA have just discovered that the biggest black holes in the known universe are growing faster than previous researches revealed. The speed at which 'supermassive' black holes – massive celestial bodies at the center of big galaxies - are expanding outstrips the pace at which their galaxies can produce new stars.  This ultimately means that numerous of the universe's major black holes are far greater than first thought, and they might be slowly wiping out their own parent galaxies, researchers say. This major discovery might re-shape our basic understanding of how galaxies and their massive black holes form and co-exist. Black holes are present in the middle of most galaxies. These Black holes are so dense that nothing, not even light, can escape their intense gravitational pull. These Black holes are formed when the center of a very massive star, at its last stages, collapses in upon itself. Data gathered by previous researches has recommended that bla...

Another deluge of curio mounts as the astronomer, Dustin Lang from the University of Toronto, tweeted about a baffling X-shaped bulge, comprising stars and interstellar matter, lying at the heart of Milky Way’s flat structure. Further analysis of this massive structure can lend a fair insight of how the galaxy was formed, scientists envision.  “The bulge is a key signature of formation of the Milky Way. If we understand the bulge, we will understand the key processes that have formed and shaped our galaxy” says Melissa Ness, who is a postdoctoral researcher from the Max Planck institute for Astronomy, Germany. Milky Way. NASA/JPL-Caltech/S. Stolovy (SSC/Caltech) “The X-shaped morphology of the bulge in itself and the fraction of bulge stars that comprise orbits within this structure has important implications for the formation history of the Milky Way, and spiral galaxies in general” published by Ness and Lang , who are expected to team up as a proper and detailed research starts ...

As our current video games become more and more lifelike and realistic, it's becoming clear that at some point, perhaps soon, our simulations will be indistinguishable from reality. If that's true, how do we know it didn't already happen? Could we be in a simulation now? A simulation created by someone? Moderator Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the museum’s Hayden Planetarium, put the odds at 50-50 that our entire existence is just a program on someone else’s hard drive. “I think the likelihood may be very high,” he said. He noted the obvious  gap between human and chimpanzee intelligence, despite that the fact that we share more than 98 percent of our DNA. Somewhere out there could be a being whose intelligence is that much greater than our own. “We would be drooling, blithering idiots in their presence,” he said. “If that’s the case, it is easy for me to imagine that everything in our lives is just a creation of some other entity for their entertainment.” This is rea...

Yes you heard it right. Physicists have just made what they say is the first ever device that's completely capable of producing particles that act as if they have negative mass. This particular device produces a peculiar particle that's half-light/half-matter, and as if that doesn’t sound cool enough, it might also be the foundation for a completely new kind of laser that could function on far less energy than present technologies. This forms on new theoretical work on the behavior of something called a polariton, which seems to act as if it has negative mass – a mind-bending property that perceives objects move towards the force pushing it, instead of being pushed away. Now physicists from the University of Rochester have created a device that allows them to actually create these polaritons at room temperature. They do this by manipulating captured photons and combine them with a kind of quasi-particle called an exciton to make something half-light/half-matter that some scien...

Cosmos” is returning to the National Geographic Channel and Fox . The networks have ordered a second season of the science documentary television series, which is a follow-up to the 1980s series “Cosmos: A Personal Voyage” with Carl Sagan. Neil deGrasse Tyson, the astrophysicist and host of the Emmy Award-nominated “Star Talk,” returns as host of the series, scheduled to premiere globally in Spring 2019. The announcement was made at the Television Critics Association winter press tour on Saturday. The series hails from executive producer, writer, and director Ann Druyan, Sagan’s widow and one of the writers on the original 1980s series. She and Steven Soter, another writer from the original show, won the Emmy for Outstanding Writing for Nonfiction Programming in 2014 for the show’s first season. Seth MacFarlane, Brannon Braga, and Jason Clark also serve as executive producers. It will be produced by Cosmos Studios, the Ithaca, NY-based company Druyan co-founded in 2000, and Fuzzy Door...

You can call it whatever—a purple moon, a blue red moon or a blood moon—but on 31 st Jan, the moon will be a special and you don’t want to miss. Three distinct astronomic events will happen concurrently that night, resulting in what some are referring it as a super blue blood moon eclipse .  This particular astronomical rarity hasn't occurred for more than 150 years. A super moon, like the one observable on New Year's Day, is the term for when a full moon is closest to the Earth in its orbit, appearing bigger and brighter than normal. On Jan. 31, the moon will be full for the second time in a month, a rare occasion—it happens once every two and a half years—known as a blue moon. To top it off, there will also be a total lunar eclipse. But unlike last year's solar eclipse, this sky-watching event isn't going to be as visible in the continental United States. The best views of the middle-of-the-night eclipse will be in central and eastern Asia, Indonesia, New Zeal...

Microgravity environments do strange and often undesirable things to the human body, such as weakening muscles and bones, shrinking hearts, and flattening eyeballs. But it’s also known to make astronauts a bit taller, as Norishige Kanai is now learning. The Japanese astronaut arrived at the ISS just three weeks ago.  In just three weeks he’s already grown an astonishing 3.5 inches (9 cm)—and he’s now really worried that he won’t fit into the seat of the Russian Soyuz return vehicle. This may seem like nothing but it is a serious problem and may have some serious consequences. “Good morning, good morning,” tweeted Kanai earlier today from the International Space Station. “Today there is a serious report... I had physical measurements since I got to space... [with] heights up to 9 centimeters! I grew like some plant in just three weeks, nothing like this since I was a junior high school student. I am a bit worried whether my body will fit in the return Soyuz seat.” Along with astron...