technical updates

Supermassive black holes are best known for their immense gravity, pulling in everything that strays too close, even light. But new research suggests these cosmic giants can also hurl enormous amounts of energy outward, driving powerful disturbances that ripple hundreds of thousands of light-years through space. A study led by Satoshi Yamada of Tohoku University in Japan found that winds generated by an actively feeding supermassive black hole are about 100 times more powerful than astronomers previously estimated. These outflows, scientists say, inject an amount of energy comparable to several billion supernova explosions, driving turbulence through hot gas across distances of roughly 300,000 light-years —far beyond the boundaries of the host galaxy itself. "Black holes are largely known for sucking matter in, but they also eject gas in the form of powerful winds," Yamada said in a ...

Not every canceled NASA program earns a halo after its demise, but one scrapped project is finding new life by contributing its parts to help the space agency achieve its moon base goals faster. Northrop Grumman is repurposing hardware and technology from the Habitation and Logistics Outpost (HALO) space station module for use on a new series of Lunar Infrastructure Demo (LID) missions. HALO was originally designed as the habitation module for NASA's since-cancelled moon-orbiting Gateway space station but found itself on the chopping block when the agency restructured the Artemis program architecture earlier this year. Rather than scrap the unfinished module outright, Northrop Grumman will adapt HALO's electrical and mechanical components to support the development of technologies for a moon base that can survive the cold, weeks-long night at the lunar south pole while sustaining the l...

Eighteen years later, it still gives me a jump scare, even though I know it's coming. Agent Mulder, hot on the trail of a group of murderers who are harvesting their victims' organs, breaks into a makeshift laboratory in an attempt to save an abducted woman. He finds a gruesome scene of bodies on ice and surgeons, scalpels in hand, preparing to transplant the villain's head onto the abducted woman's body. Mulder turns and  — there it is! The villain's severed head on ice! And it opens its eyes . It sounds less like a scene out of a science fiction mystery series and one more suited to a horror film. And that's precisely why Chris Carter, creator of " The X-Files ", is revisiting the 2008 film "The X-Files: I Want to Believe" in a new R-rated director's cut coming to Hulu on Aug. 14. Space.com got the chance to speak with Carter about the upcoming di...

For the generation that grew up in the 1980s, the release of the recent big-budget " Masters of the Universe " movie would undoubtedly have conjured up a sense of déjà-vu. Picture the scene. The year is 1987. You've got the action figures and the Castle Grayskull playset, you've watched every episode of the cartoon again and again, and you can recite He-Man's opening credits voiceover by heart. He has the power! Then someone tells you there's a live-action film adaptation coming out. You persuade your parents to take you to the theater, pick up a great big bucket of popcorn, and get ready to be transported to the familiar surroundings of Eternia. And then… Well, it's fair to say this is not the "Masters of the Universe" you know and love. Sure, leading man Dolph Lundgren is big, but why does he look and dress nothing like He-Man? Who's that Gwildor guy,...

And just like that, it's over. Total solar eclipses are incredible moments in time, but they are fleeting. As the moon passes directly in front of the sun and its shadow sweeps across Earth's surface, the temperature drops and the light takes on an eerie twilight quality. Birds and other animals go quiet. It's a spectacle unlike any other. And for millions today who were lucky enough to be in the path of totality across Greenland, Iceland and Spain, that's exactly what they experienced . "I cannot believe what I just witnessed. I knew what to expect  — I've seen thousands of photos but nothing compares to that feeling you get when you watch the sun transform before your very eyes," Space.com skywatching editor Daisy Dobrijevic said after watching the eclipse from the deck of the MS Spitsbergen on the HX Expeditions eclipse voyage in Scoresby Sund, Greenland on Aug....

A radiation-shielding vest might one day protect astronauts from dangerous, random outbursts from the sun, a new study finds. More than 50 years after the final Apollo mission, NASA's Artemis program aims to return humans to the moon . To succeed, this project must protect astronauts from solar radiation, especially the intense and unpredictable radiation from solar storms . Coating an entire spacecraft with a meaningfully thick layer of radiation shielding remains impractical due to weight constraints, but wrapping astronauts in protective garments may potentially be helpful. In the new study, researchers experimented with the AstroRad vest , which was designed by the Israeli startup StemRad with support from the Israel Space Agency and aerospace giant Lockheed Martin. The garment was created to protect astronauts from explosions from the sun known as solar particle events. The "phan...