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There are fastballs, and then there are cosmic fastballs. Now it seems that the strongest arm in our galaxy might belong to a supermassive black hole that lives smack in the middle of the Milky Way.

Astronomers recently discovered a star whizzing out of the center of our galaxy at the seriously blinding speed of four million miles an hour. The star, which goes by the typically inscrutable name S5-HVS1, is currently about 29,000 light-years from Earth, streaking through the Grus, or Crane, constellation in the southern sky. It is headed for the darkest, loneliest depths of intergalactic space.

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The moon is more than just a pretty face to gaze upon at night. It helps direct our ocean currents and tides, the movement of Earth’s atmosphere and climate, and even the tilt of our planet’s axis.

NASA engineers are dusting off a 20-year-old science instrument for a series of upcoming Moon landing missions.

NASA has contracted with two private companies so far to build landers for a series of uncrewed science missions to the Moon, with the first launches planned for 2021. The uncrewed lander missions are the first phase of NASA’s Artemis program, with the ambitious eventual goals of crewed Moon landings, an orbital lunar outpost, and lunar mining. To that end, several of the instruments are focused on better understanding where and how to look for hydrogen, water, and other important chemical compounds on the Moon.

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Pamela Petersen, a teacher at York Middle School and a Nebraska Space Ambassador (NSA) for the University of Nebraska at Omaha’s (UNO) NASA Nebraska Space Grant office, was awarded a Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching (PAEMST).

The PAEMST program, administered by the National Science Foundation (NSF) on behalf of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy recognizes outstanding teachers for their contributions to the teaching and learning of science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and/or computer science.

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BOZEMAN — On the launch pad at White Sands Missile Range, the 10-foot section of a NASA sounding rocket housing scientific instruments designed and built by a team at Montana State University to observe explosive events in the sun’s atmosphere was encased in Styrofoam to shield it from the New Mexico sun.

Graduate student Catherine Bunn monitored the instruments’ temperature, chilling them as needed with liquid nitrogen. Fellow graduate students Roy Smart and Jacob Parker, along with Charles Kankelborg, a professor in the Department of Physics in the College of Letters and Science, made last-minute checks.

But would the rocket fly?

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What images go through your mind when you think of the end of the world? Asteroids? Perhaps a world war? Climate change? Or even aliens?

Even if some of these things are realistic, there’s a much greater threat lurking beneath Earth’s surface that could put an end to human civilisation — and very few know about it.

According to a report by the BBC, even NASA sees them as one of the greatest natural threats to humanity: supervolcanoes.

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A Delta flight operated exclusively by women, and carrying 120 young females as passengers, took off this week to inspire more women to become aviators and advocate for equality in a “male-dominated industry.”

The Delta “WING” flight — Women Inspiring our Next Generation — took girls between the ages of 12 to 18 from Salt Lake City to NASA headquarters in Houston to draw attention to the need to close the gender gap in aviation and promote STEM careers, according to a press release from the airline on Sunday.

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This year marks 50 years since NASA’s Apollo 11 landed on the moon. In 1969, the world watched in amazement as astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong took the first lunar steps while Michael Collins orbited the moon. 

July 20 was the official anniversary, and to celebrate this unprecedented historical event, local students took to their STEM inventions to recreate the Apollo 11 mission in the form of a lunar module replica — a drone to carry it and a LEGO robot called Mindstorms EV3. 

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