space

According to NASA's article on the test, this is a big step toward sending a manned mission to Mars:

NASA successfully tested the first deep space RS-25 rocket engine for 500 seconds March 10, clearing a major milestone toward the next great era of space exploration. The next time rocket engine No. 2059 fires for that length of time, it will be carrying humans on their first deep-space mission in more than 45 years.

This is all part of a plan to send humans to Mars by 2030, which NASA has laid out in this beautifully illustrated image:

NASA released images of the recent solar eclipse. When seen from the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) it's just the shadow of the moon traveling across Earth. 

This is a first, according to Adam Szabo, NASA’s project scientist for DSCOVR: 

What is unique for us is that being near the Sun-Earth line, we follow the complete passage of the lunar shadow from one edge of the Earth to the other. A geosynchronous satellite would have to be lucky to have the middle of an eclipse at noon local time for it. I am not aware of anybody ever capturing the full eclipse in one set of images or video.

via earthobservatory

NASA engineer and physicist Harold White is working on using the theory of relativity to travel at warp speed. The ship will be called IXS Enterprise, while he's still working on the math to prove it can be done, the concept art has already been completed by designer Mark Rademaker. In an interview with The Washington Post Rademaker explained the purpose behind the designs:

"We wanted to have a decent image of a theory conforming Warp ship to motivate young people to pursue a STEM career," Rademaker said in an e-mail interview. "It does have some Sci-Fi features that might never transfer to a possible final design, unless we really want to."

The Hubble Space Telescope took this image of a star that looks like it's inside a blue bubble. NASA says the blue bubble is actually a nebula formed around 20,000 years ago. This is how it's described on the Hubble's website:

The distinctive blue bubble appearing to encircle WR 31a is a Wolf–Rayet nebula — an interstellar cloud of dust, hydrogen, helium and other gases. Created when speedy stellar winds interact with the outer layers of hydrogen ejected by Wolf–Rayet stars, these nebulae are frequently ring-shaped or spherical.

According to NASA, these type of stars don't last very long (in terms of bodies in space at least). It'll only be around for a "few hundred thousand years".

This beautiful video is a look at a map of the Milky Way that was just released. The video description explains in detail about how the image was made:

This video takes a close look at a new image of the Milky Way released to mark the completion of the APEX Telescope Large Area Survey of the Galaxy (ATLASGAL). The APEX telescope in Chile has mapped the full area of the Galactic Plane visible from the southern hemisphere for the first time at submillimetre wavelengths — between infrared light and radio waves — and in finer detail than recent space-based surveys.

The APEX data, at a wavelength of 0.87 millimetres, shows up in red and the background blue image was imaged at shorter infrared wavelengths by the NASA Spitzer Space Telescope as part of the GLIMPSE survey. The fainter extended red structures come from complementary observations made by ESA's Planck satellite.

Science is rad.

Astronaut Tim Peake posted a time lapse video from the International Space Station (ISS) that caught a particularly striking view of lightening as it flew over Earth. According to the caption, all these lightening strikes happened in a matter of minutes:

Flying from North Africa over Turkey towards Russia in this timelapse (this is speeded up; travelling about 5500 km would take around 10-12 minutes, covered here in 30 seconds).

What are these glorious golden space swirls? According to NASA, who captured this video with the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), this happened when a dark solar filament erupted and caused a chain reaction.They call these cascading magnetic arches because what you see here is a lot of particles spinning around the sun's magnetic field lines. 

Here's a video where you can see what a dark solar filament looks like. The darker area, almost in the shape of a circle is it. Filaments are plasma held above the sun's surface by magnetic forces. 

Neil deGrasse Tyson took to Twitter recently to toy with some earthlings, challenge, nitpick, and critique a series of scientific inaccuracies in 'Star Wars: The Force Awakens.'

In @StarWars #TheForceAwakens, BB-8, a smooth rolling metal spherical ball, would have skidded uncontrollably on sand.

— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) December 21, 2015

In @StarWars #TheForceAwakens, if you were to suck all of a star's energy into your planet, your planet would vaporize.

— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) December 21, 2015

In @StarWars #TheForceAwakens, the energy in a Star is enough to destroy ten-thousand planets, not just a few here & there.

— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) December 21, 2015

He's done this in the past with other movies like 'Interstellar,' and quite frankly, it's a bit of an unbecoming buzzkill. Tyson doesn't care though, and claims some of the audience will watch sci-fi films for ideas on what to invent for future days.