It’s official: astronomers found a new dwarf planet in our Solar System – and it’s the most distant object ever observed in our Solar System. “I said ‘far out!’ when I discovered it, and it’s a very far out object,” said astronomer Scott Shepard from the Carnegie Institution for Science, as quoted by New Scientist.

A mysterious fireball that exploded over Greenland earlier in the year has provided a unique test-case to study the structure of distant, ice-coated alien worlds, new research reports. For months, we haven’t known a lot about what the meteorite event in July entailed, although early data showed it was one of the most energetic fireballs

Ever since the Apollo missions explored the lunar surface, scientists have known that the Moon’s craters are the result of a long history of meteor and asteroid impacts. But it has only been in the past few decades that we have come to understand how regular these are. In fact, every few hours, an impact

There’s a kind of exoplanet out there that is suspiciously rare. We call them “hot Neptunes”, and only a few have been discovered among the 3,869 confirmed exoplanets. But astronomers have made an eye-watering discovery of an evaporating planet that could prove to be the missing link. Called Gliese 3470 b, this planet is losing

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, the first human-made object to fly into the Sun’s corona, completed its first solar flyby on November 11, collecting a wealth of unprecedented data about the workings of our magnificent home star. And now, weeks later, that data is arriving home. It may be a little bit of a wait for

Virgin Galactic launched a spacecraft more than 50 miles (80 km) high Thursday, reaching the Federal Aviation Administration’s definition of space and capturing a long-elusive goal for the company founded by Richard Branson that one day wants to fly tourists through the atmosphere. Though it did not reach orbit, the flight was the first launch

A Chinese lander destined for the far side of the Moon – the side that always faces away from the Earth – has now entered lunar orbit, Space News reports. Early Wednesday morning, the spacecraft carrying the Chang’e-4 lander completed its journey from Earth, which took nearly five days, and settled into an elliptical orbit

The death of a binary star can be a spectacularly violent thing. This picture shows the binary system R Aquarii, a red giant throwing off its outer envelope, which is being greedily cannibalised by its companion, a much smaller, denser white dwarf. The dramatic moment you’re looking at unfolded just 650 light-years from Earth –

It took a little longer than expected, but by all accounts, Tuesday’s spacewalk was a success. At around 11:00 am ET (16:00 UTC), International Space Station (ISS) cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko and Sergei Prokopyev set out on a spacewalk expected to take about six hours. The purpose: examine a hole in the Soyuz capsule that some

NASA’s InSight lander has taken its first selfie on Mars. The selfie, released on Tuesday and shown above, is made up of 11 images that were stitched together. The resulting photo shows InSight’s solar panels and deck, along with the scientific instruments on top of the deck and the lander’s weather sensor. (NASA/JPL-Caltech) InSight landed

Black holes are great at sucking up matter. So great, in fact, that not even light can escape their grasp (hence the name). But given their talent for consumption, why don’t black holes just keep expanding and expanding and simply swallow the Universe? Now, one of the world’s top physicists has come up with a

The Geminids meteor shower peaks on the mornings of December 13 and 14, 2018 – but if you look up any time there’s a clear night sky up until December 17, you might just catch a glimpse of a Geminid meteor. The Geminids shower is unusual as it is one of two meteor showers confirmed

Throughout Earth’s history, one question rises, again and again: what were the factors that killed off a species or a population of animals? Many of them are terrestrial in origin, but a mysterious event that killed off 36 percent of the ocean’s genera 2.6 million years ago in the Pliocene, including the famous giant, bus-sized

A lone spacecraft is hovering 12 miles above the surface of a tiny asteroid millions of miles away, closely examining its surface. And it just sent back its first readings. As part of NASA’s Origins Program, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft traveled to an asteroid called Bennu some 100 million miles (160 million kilometers) from the Sun,

About 11 billion miles from Earth, a NASA probe has broken another record for humanity. The space agency separately launched its twin Voyager spacecraft in 1977 with a mission to explore the outer Solar System. The car-size Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 probes exploited a rare alignment of the planets (and their gravitational fields) to

Being in space can have weird and sometimes harmful effects on the human body, and we’ll have to work through those issues if we’re to make it out to Mars and beyond, and stay healthy. But it looks like we have finally found one feature of the human body that’s untroubled by microgravity – and

Every 5.4 years, the comet 46P/Wirtanen orbits the Sun, swinging through Earth’s skies on its way. This year, its visit is in December, and we’re going to be able to see it – in fact, it’s visible in the sky now if you have binoculars or a telescope. Usually, 46P/Wirtanen is too far away for

When it comes to prodding the very boundaries of the Solar System we all reside in, astronomers have had a notoriously tricky time of figuring out where those edges truly lie. For example, it took a whole year to officially confirm that Voyager 1 had reached the interstellar medium of space – the first spacecraft

NASA scientists released audio Friday of rumbles captured by its InSight lander on the surface of Mars. The sound recorded with InSight’s sensors on December 1 comes from vibrations caused by wind that NASA estimates was blowing at about 10 to 15 mph (16 to 24 km/h). InSight, which is an acronym for “Interior Exploration

It’s official. At 2:23 am in southern China, a rocket carrying unique payload successfully launched from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center. On board is a lander which, if all goes smoothly, will soon make history by touching down on the far side of the Moon. Liftoff for the Chang’e-4 lunar far side landing mission pic.twitter.com/TEfkEsz4F4

While we have yet to figure out how to travel by warp drive, we have found other ways for spacecraft to propel themselves at mind-boggling speeds across vast distances of outer space. Ion drives, for instance, have enabled spacecraft like the NASA’s Deep Space 1 and Dawn to travel years at a time at record-breaking

Galaxies spin faster than they should. Space is spreading apart when it shouldn’t. And it’s all starting to feel like we’re forever going to be in the dark when it comes to the big questions in physics. One physicist’s solution lies in a hypothetical ‘fluid’ with negative mass. No, such a material has never been

It’s an unusual reason to delay a cargo launch planned to dock with the International Space Station: moldy food bars. Forty mice were going to hitch a ride today on board SpaceX’s latest cargo mission as part of a NASA-sponsored experiment called Rodent Research-8, which will explore mechanisms behind aging and age-related diseases. But now

Aliens with super intelligence may have already visited us here on Earth. We were just too set in our ways to notice. It sounds like the plot of a new sci-fi film, but NASA computer scientist Silvano Colombano has suggested it’s a real possibility. The internet has found a recent workshop paper of his, and

We humans are very curious about the nuclear furnace that powers life on Earth. We’ve looked at the Sun in so many different ways, both Earth-based and space-based. Yet we’ve had a really hard time getting a glimpse of its poles. Now a solar mission has given us just that, in the form of an

Four new detections of gravitational waves have been announced at the Gravitational Waves Physics and Astronomy Workshop, at the University of Maryland in the United States. This brings the total number of detections to 11, since the first back in 2015. Ten are from binary black hole mergers and one from the merger of two

The first Russian rocket to fly with people since a harrowing failure two months ago blasted off Monday morning in a successful return to flight. The Soyuz rocket and spacecraft launched at 5:31 pm local time (6:31 am Eastern time) with three people on board – NASA astronaut Anne C. McClain, Canadian astronaut David Saint-Jacques

For the past two years, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft has sailed across the solar system by the light of the stars. Like ancient mariners and the Apollo astronauts, it needed the constancy of the constellations to navigate the dark unknown. All that changed Monday, when the NASA probe finally reached its target, an Empire State Building-size

The Intentional Space Station can be a fabulous place of learning and wonder. But to get to that wonder, there’s always some troubleshooting to be done – and that work falls to the astronauts crewing the ISS missions. Take this recent footage of astronauts grappling with CIMON – a floating robot head similar to Siri

A former NASA astronaut says the agency he used to work for has a duty to protect civilians from killer asteroids, but that it isn’t meeting that obligation. The threat of asteroid strikes might seem as abstract as outer space itself. But the risk, while infrequent, is real – and potentially more deadly than the

Astronomers have been able to get their closest, most detailed look yet at the first stages of a dying star – a supernova known as SN 2018oh – using a combination of super-powerful telescopes out in space and based here on Earth. This unprecedented look at the death throes of SN 2018oh (also labelled ASASSN-18bt), around

We need to talk about the dark ages. No, not those dark ages after the fall of the western Roman Empire. The cosmological dark ages. The time in our Universe, billions of years ago, before the formation of the first stars. And we need to talk about the cosmic dawn: the birth of those first

NASA’s next lunar science experiments will arrive at the Moon via a spacecraft built by one of nine private companies – a first for one of the agency’s science missions. In an announcement Thursday, the space agency named the organizations that are now eligible to bid on delivering science and technology payloads to the lunar

Have you ever stopped to wonder exactly how much light has been produced by all the stars in the Universe, over all the time that has passed? Well, now you can wonder no more. An international team of astronomers has actually calculated the amount of starlight in the cosmos. And it’s teaching us new things

Just as moons orbit planets, planets orbit stars, and stars orbit galactic cores, galaxies can be orbited by other, much smaller galaxies. The Milky Way has several of these hangers-on, most notably the Large and Small Magellanic clouds, the only two of our galaxy’s satellites visible to the naked eye. Now, thanks to Gaia data

At the heart of our galaxy, the core around which everything in the Milky Way orbits, lies the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A*. Without the gravitationally binding force of Sgr A*, the Milky Way wouldn’t exist – yet, although it’s only 25,640 light-years away, we’ve never seen it. We’ll never actually see a black hole,

A six-month-long journey that could shape the future of humanity reached its nail-biting conclusion today. On May 5th, NASA launched its InSight Mars lander from California’s Vanderberg Air Force Base. On Monday afternoon, following “seven minutes of terror,” the craft reached its final destination – Elysium Planitia, a flat plain near the Red Planet’s equator

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said there’s a “70 per cent chance” he’ll personally travel to Mars. Musk, 47, told Axios’ new program on HBO that he believes Mars exploration is more than just a fantasy dreamed up by the super-wealthy who may want to use space travel as an “escape hatch”. “Your probability of dying

Six months after blasting off from Earth, NASA’s InSight lander is minutes away from touching down on the surface of Mars. This plucky little robot is about to streak into the Martian atmosphere at 19,310 km/h (12,000 mph) before making its delicate and complicated landing – known as the ‘seven minutes of terror’. But don’t

It’s the mother of all conspiracy theories: the unflinching belief that the 1969 Moon landing never actually happened. Proponents of this seemingly unshakeable conviction argue that what the masses perceived as a groundbreaking scientific achievement was in fact an elaborate fake: a hoax perpetrated by NASA and the US government on the American (and international)

An uninvited guest has been caught hitching a ride on the International Space Station, and it’s a worrying one. JPL-NASA Scientists have identified strains of Enterobacter collected from the space station’s toilet and exercise area. If you’ve heard of the genus before, it’s probably in relation to hospitals. Some Enterobacter strains can infect immunocompromised patients

If you aren’t nervous for NASA’s InSight Mars probe, you probably should be. Getting a rocket ride to the red planet is the easy part. It’s touching down on Mars that aerospace engineers consider to be one of the greatest challenges in the solar system; in fact, about a third of missions successfully launched to

NASA has made a commitment to send humans to Mars by the 2030s. This is an ambitious goal when you think that a typical round trip will anywhere between three and six months and crews will be expected to stay on the red planet for up to two years before planetary alignment allows for the

Back in the 1970s, NASA’s Mariner and Viking Missions were sent out to explore other planets in our Solar System. All three of them (there were two Viking missions) captured images of Mars’ moon Phobos during their travels. They were our first images of the tiny, potato-shaped moon, and the images held a mystery: strange

Gathering detailed information on exoplanets is extremely difficult. The light from their host star overwhelms the light from the exoplanet, making it difficult for telescopes to see them. But now a team using cutting-edge technology at the Keck Observatory has taken a big leap in exoplanet observation and has detected water in the atmosphere of a planet

A new study suggests that Earth might have once had a different kind of magnetic field – one generated by oceans of magma on its surface, instead of the rotation of its core. And that’s good news, because it means more exoplanets than we thought could have a protective magnetic shield sheltering them from the

We’ve arrived at a sad realisation. A handful of pixels in about 90 percent of the images taken by one of the major instruments on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter are showing things that just aren’t there. Researchers uncovered the error after searching for better signs of moisture-absorbing materials on the Martian surface. Not only did

If life is to spark in the Universe like it does on Earth, a few things seem to be required, such as an atmosphere, ozone layer, liquid water, and habitable temperatures. But before it ever gets to that point – before planets even form – space itself needs to be primed, courtesy of ultraviolet and