Blog - Philip Ferreira

  The Chang'e-5 robotic mission landed a few hours ago on lunar soil and aims to collect samples of rock and dust to bring them back to Earth. The venture targets a site called Mons Rümker, a volcanic complex in a nearby region known as Oceanus Procellarum.The spacecraft's landing module should spend the next few days examining its surroundings and gathering materials from the lunar...

  They are all tropical cyclones, but the name hurricane is used exclusively for those in the North Atlantic and the Pacific Northwest. How do they form and why do they usually occur in this part of the world? A power pump The most common mechanism of hurricane formation in the Atlantic - which causes more than 60% of these phenomena - is a tropical wave. When it reaches the Atlantic...

Two European satellites have spotted a catastrophic oil spill in the Arctic Circle. About 20,000 tons of diesel oil has leaked into a river in the Arctic Circle after a fuel tank at a power plant near the Siberian city of Norilsk collapsed last Friday (May 29). The Russian Investigative Committee has launched an investigation into the incident, as the plant reportedly...

Chalk up yet another win for Einstein. A twist in the fabric of spacetime is causing the orbit of one stellar corpse to teeter around another stellar corpse, researchers report. And the relativistic corkscrew is helping astronomers reconstruct the final days of these two long-dead stars. According to general relativity, any spinning mass drags spacetime around with it, like a hand mixer in...

  The space probe Parker was launched in 2018 with a mission and either: unravel the mysteries of one of the least explored places in the solar system, its own central star. And a year later, the mission of NASA reported on Wednesday its first comments from the edge of the Sun's atmosphere, where no other mission had come before. The revelations, divided into four articles published in...