An international collaboration of scientists has recorded the most accurate confirmation to date for one of the cornerstones of Einstein’s theory of general relativity, ‘the universality of free fall.”

The new research shows that the theory holds for strongly self-gravitating objects such as neutron stars. Using a radio telescope, scientists can very accurately observe the signal produced by pulsars, a type of neutron star and test the validity of Einstein’s theory of gravity for these extreme objects. In particular, the team analyzed the signals from a pulsar named “PSR J0337+1715’ recorded by the large radio telescope of Nançay, located in the heart of Sologne (France).

The universality of free fall principle states that two bodies dropped in a gravitational field undergo the very same acceleration independently of their composition. This was first demonstrated by Galileo who famously would have dropped objects of different masses from the top of Pisa’s tower to verify that they both reach the ground simultaneously.

A controversial scientist had his unconventional “mushrooms on Mars” study accepted by a prestigious journal, and then things just stopped. Since Rhawn Joseph has taken matters into his own hands.

A female-led crew trained for nine days in an undersea laboratory in the Atlantic to get a sense of what it’s like to live and work in microgravity.

It’s the second time Kathy Sullivan has made history, this time with @EYOSExpeditions. #NASA

After her dive yesterday, Dr. Kathy Sullivan spoke to astronauts on the International Space Station to compare notes about “recyclable” vessels for undersea and space exploration.

Asked by: Shannon Ripsher.

Astronomers don’t know exactly when the first stars formed in the Universe because they haven’t been observed yet. And now, new observations from the Hubble Space Telescope suggest the first stars and galaxies may have formed even earlier than previously estimated.

Why? We *still* haven’t seen them, even with the best telescope we’ve got, pushed to its limits.

A group of researchers used Hubble to look back in time (and space) as far as it could see, hoping to study these first generation of stars of the early Universe, which are called Population III stars. Hubble peered and squinted back to when the Universe was just 500 million years old – which is thought to be Hubble’s limit — and found no evidence of these very first stars.

NASA/ESA’s Hubble Space Telescope has just captured a striking new image of a globular cluster some 44,000 light-years away from Earth and 13,000 light-years from the heart of the Milky Way. NGC 6441 is a 13-billion-year-old collection of galaxies existing in the southern constellation of Scorpius,…