Tagged: Matter

How Plasma Rockets Work

Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Blast off! Into the sky shoots a rocket ship, quickly moving beyond our atmosphere and into outer space. In the last half-century, people have gone from just looking up in amazement at the stars glimmering in the night sky to...

3-D Printing Your Own Tractor Beam Levitation Device

Seen any Star Wars films? Then you know all about tractor beams — a sort of gadgetry that enables a spacecraft to grab a smaller ship and drag it along as if it were lashed with a cable, all by using some sort of invisible...

Could Dark Matter Spawn ‘Shadow Life’?

Who says baryonic matter gets to have all the fun of creating life? FANCY/VEER/CORBIS/GETTY IMAGES The vast majority of mass in our universe is invisible, and for a while, physicists have been trying really hard to understand what this elusive “stuff” is. Assumed to be...

Tiny Satellite to Search Universe for Missing Matter

HaloSat was launched into orbit in May aboard a Cygnus spacecraft and released from the International Space Station over Australia on July 13, 2018. It is charged with studying the halo of hot gas surrounding the Milky Way as part of a mission to search...