Sorry to our fellow hopeful space nerds, but we have to burst everyone’s warp bubble. Despite recent reports that scientists have “accidentally created a warp bubble,” it looks like warp speed is still a few baby steps away. But all hope is not lost: a group of scientists led by Dr. Harold G. “Sunny” White has proposed a structure that could actually be built in the real world and used to study the Casimir effect. It might be a baby step, but it’s a real one.

Breaking the ‘cosmic speed limit’ with the Casimir effect

To make a warp drive, first you need to master the Casimir effect. The Casimir effect, for the uninitiated, is a very small attractive force that exists between two uncharged but conductive parallel plates that are held very, very close together. It used to be a purely hypothetical offshoot of relativity. However, now that we’ve seen it happen in real life, it’s high on the list of real-world phenomena scientists are investigating to figure out how we might finally crack the problem of interstellar space exploration.

The Red planet was still getting bombarded after 4.48 billion years.

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It is believed to be the second oldest meteorite discovered, about two billion years old, and contains the most water found in any of Mars’ fallen rocks.

Previous studies of Black Beauty have shown that the meteorite lacked signatures of shock deformation, which led scientists to believe that Mars stopped experiencing heavy bombardment from flying space rocks about 4.48 billion years ago. This also suggested that the planet could have developed habitable conditions early on in its history.

The team behind the new study probed NWA 7,034, analyzing a total of 66 zircon grains. Zircon is a rare mineral found on Mars that scientists refer to as a time capsule since it preserves information about its environment from the day it was created.

At nearly one mile wide, the Earth Trojan is the largest yet—but it’s not here to stay.

Dr. Arpita Roy, Space Telescope Science Institute.

It has been three decades since astronomers first discovered planets outside our solar system. This profound scientific moment established the field of exoplanet science and has led us on a whirlwind tour of other worlds, none of which (so far) have been quite like our own.

With a few thousand planets under our belt, we are now preparing to hone in on truly Earth-like planets by upgrading some of our oldest planet-hunting tools.

In this lecture, we will traverse four orders of magnitude in improvement and encounter surprisingly dangerous experiments. All of these developments have led to an unprecedented view of the subtle dance being performed by the stars in our sky.