Polish astronomers just discovered two new planets in our galaxy. That’s cool news on its own, but these planets are different from most. Unlike almost all known planets, New Scientist reports, these two planets don’t orbit a star. Instead, they drift aimlessly through the cold, dead void of space — and presumably spend their time

An extraordinary account of the impact space weather had on military operations in Vietnam in 1972 was found buried in the US Navy archives, according to a newly published article in Space Weather. On August 4, 1972, the crew of a US Task Force 77 aircraft flying near a naval minefield in the waters off

According to some alarming tabloid headlines, three giant asteroids are skimming by Earth this weekend – one as long as a blue whale! Here’s what’s really going on: there are a number of asteroids about to zip through Earth’s general neighbourhood, according to a NASA asteroid watch website. But we’re not in any danger whatsoever

The sky above Earth is never completely dark. Even at night a soft glow emanates from the rim of the upper atmosphere. It’s always there, right above us, but it’s tricky to see from Earth. Lucky for us, an astronaut on board the International Space Station has captured the spectacular effect from space. The photograph

Black holes, while fascinating, are hardly a new discovery – but a black hole spinning at one of the highest speeds ever, according to the Hindustan Times, is a completely different story – especially when there have only ever been four others like it. In 2016, India’s first dedicated astronomy satellite, the AstroSat, spotted a

Roughly one billion light-years from Earth, a giant elliptical galaxy has been found to be an enthusiastic recycler – albeit not of plastic bottles. The supermassive black hole at its core is blasting cold molecular gas, which is then falling into the black hole, and feeding the cycle anew. Such a phenomenon is known as

You step off the plane, having travelled across the world to the opposite hemisphere. The seasons are all backwards, and when you look up at the full Moon, you realise it’s not even the right way up! Not only is this incredibly weird (mostly because, how did we not realise this before?), but this curious

The first components of the International Space Station (ISS) launched into space more than 20 years ago, and it’s been continuously occupied for 18. Right now, it’s the only operational space station in orbit – but that’s about to change. China just unveiled a life-size replica of the core module of the country’s new space

It’s a big Universe, that’s for sure, which means we might not necessarily cross paths with any other lifeforms that might be out there. But if we want to attract the attention of any galactic neighbours, apparently we could use laser technology we already have right now. Today’s lasers could be repurposed to act as

Earth is too big to fit into an X-ray or MRI scanner, so a group of physicists in Spain found a fascinating new way to peer inside - they used the subatomic particles constantly streaming through the planet. The team scanned the interior of Earth using neutrinos – and even used them to conduct an entirely

Any species reaching for the stars is bound to have its fingertips singed. Probably more than once. One of NASA’s latest posts on the Astronomy Picture of the Day website is an iconic reminder of the mishaps in our spacefaring history. “A flying saucer from outer space crash-landed in the Utah desert after being tracked

Hanging about in space can do pretty strange things to the human body, which is poorly adapted to life without gravity. It can create a slew of health problems, keeping clean is a huge hassle, and doing a wee is majorly awkward. But is it true, as a Snapple cap asserts, that you can’t burp?

Staring at the night sky can be a mind-boggling, existential experience, so every once in a while, it’s nice to see a friendly face staring back at us. In a new image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, the stars have aligned to give us just that. Here, nestled among a sea of galaxies, is a

Whenever we hear of stars discovered that formed just after the Big Bang, they’re very far away, in the far reaches of the visible Universe. But now astronomers have spotted something new: a star that’s around 13.5 billion years old, right here in our own Milky Way galaxy. It’s called 2MASS J18082002–5104378 B, and it

Sick of life right now on Earth? Head to Mars instead. Virtually, that is. Google Mars lets you explore the Red Planet without the 140-million-mile (225-million-kilometre) journey. It’s one of the most detailed maps of the planet ever made, thanks to data collected from NASA satellites and then put together in association with NASA scientists

All over the world, some truly groundbreaking telescopes are being built that will usher in a new age of astronomy. Sites include the mountain of Mauna Kea in Hawaii, Australia, South Africa, southwestern China, and the Atacama Desert – a remote plateau in the Chilean Andes. In this extremely dry environment, multiple arrays are being

On October 19th, 2017, the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System-1 (Pan-STARRS-1) in Hawaii announced the first-ever detection of an interstellar asteroid, named 1I/2017 U1 (AKA ‘Oumuamua). In the months that followed, multiple follow-up observations were conducted that allowed astronomers to get a better idea of its size and shape, while also revealing that it had the

Just days after we learned about the demise of the Kepler telescope, another NASA mission has come to an end. Tens of thousands of kilometres above the largest object in the asteroid belt, the cold body of a Dawn spacecraft now orbits in silence. Having missed several scheduled communications, the probe has been declared out

A major problem with Mars missions: Bringing enough fuel for a return journey. In a striking new first-person account in IEEE Spectrum, NASA team lead Kurt Leucht writes about how the space agency is hard at work on a potential solution he hopes will let future Mars missions – or even colonists – extract rocket

Astronomers just observed the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy sucking blobs of hot gas toward their doom at 30 percent of the speed of light. That’s an incredible 201 million mph (323 million km/h), which was enough to trigger three powerful bursts of radiation from the cloud. Researchers detected

We often think of space as peaceful and serene. In reality it’s filled with violent events, including collisions on the galactic scale. We know our own Milky Way has likely smashed up with other galaxies in the distant past; now astronomers have revealed that one particular collision resulted in a mysterious feature called the ‘thick

NASA announced Tuesday that Kepler, an orbital telescope that’s been spotting and analyzing distant planets for the past nine years, has run out of fuel and will no longer carry out scientific research. Since it launched in March 2009, the telescope identified over 2,600 planets outside of our solar system, and found that as much

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has just made history by making the closest ever approach to the Sun by a human-made object. On 29 October 2018, at 1:04 pm EDT (17:04 UTC), it crossed the previous, decades-old record of 42.73 million kilometres (26.55 million miles) from the Sun’s surface. “It’s been just 78 days since Parker

Nearly 200,000 light-years from Earth, the Small Magellanic Cloud is dying. Slowly, over vast time, the galaxy is losing its ability to form new stars – eventually to fade into a wisp of intergalactic gas. And, thanks to the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP), astronomers have borne witness to this demise in the finest

For decades the existence of weird space clouds in Earth’s orbit has been speculative and controversial, but new research looks to validate their strange reality after all. The Kordylewski clouds – two mysterious swarms of dust trapped between the competing gravitational fields of Earth and the Moon – were first hypothesised back in the 1950s,

Looking up at space reminds us that everyone and everything on Earth is stuck together on a big space rock that’s drifting through an infinite black void. Unfortunately, terrestrial concerns like work, dinner, and getting enough sleep tend to keep us facing down. Thankfully, some people not only take the time to appreciate the night

An awful lot can happen in any given week, and it’s no easy task keeping up with all the excitement – both in the world of science and beyond. To keep you up to date with our coverage at ScienceAlert, each week we put together this shareable image with some of the past week’s highlights.

Mars is a sizable planet about nine times the mass of our moon. The latest scientific research suggests Mars, despite looking like a giant desert, may harbour enough subsurface water and warmth to support microbial life today. But against the deep, dark backdrop of space, the rusty-red world looks as humble and insignificant as Earth. NASA underscored this stark reality with

The entire time the Moon has been sitting up there, quietly orbiting Earth, it turns out it’s actually been doing something incredible. Something that could help teach us about the early Universe. Off its rocky surface, the Moon reflects radio waves emitted by our home galaxy, the Milky Way. And now astronomers have detected them.

High over the peak of a long dead volcano on the Martian equator, a feathery white cloud stretches across the sky. At first glance it looks like the plume of an eruption, but Mars is a world with a cold, dead heart. It has been for some time. So what’s going on? Researchers think they

There’s something out there, watching us from the night sky. We can’t see it, but it can see us. European Southern Observatory (EOS) has recently released a new and eerie view of the active star-forming region NGC 2467, ominously known as the Skull and Crossbones Nebula. The image is both beautiful and sinister. Bound by the whims

Deep inside the diffuse haze of gas and dust that surround the smallest galaxies, dark matter could be clumping into cold droplets called ‘Bose stars’. Of course, we don’t even know what the mysterious dark matter is, let alone have evidence of invisible ‘stars’. But if current assumptions pan out, a new mathematical model suggests

Scientists have previously suspected supermassive black holes can merge together, and have seen signs of these cosmic collisions on a smaller scale. Now new research backs up the hypothesis – and shows evidence that it could be happening all across the Universe. Astronomers studying detailed radio maps of jet sources – powerful beams of ionised

After a gyroscope failure put the Hubble Space Telescope out of action on October 5, NASA engineers finally see an end to its troubles. They have its backup gyroscope operating within a normal range and expect science operations to resume imminently. The space telescope entered a low-power safe mode in early October, suspending science operations

Mars has long been thought of as dry and barren – unable to harbour life. But research over the past few years indicates that there is most likely some briny water present there today, including a possible subsurface lake. This has led to new hopes that there could actually be life on the Red Planet

On a clear night, you might be able to point out a few constellations — maybe the Big Dipper, Orion’s Belt, and your Zodiac sign. But to see the Hulk and Albert Einstein, you’re going to need help from a powerful space telescope. On June 11, 2008, NASA launched the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. Every three

The European Space Agency (ESA) will launch its BepiColombo mission to the planet Mercury from its spaceport near the equator in Kourou, French Guyana, on October 20. My involvement in the mission means that I will be anxiously following the journey as the spacecraft carries out a series of tricky manoeuvres, culminating in its final

The streets of Chengdu in western China could soon be lit up by an artificial satellite moon in the night-time, rather than the more conventional streetlights, if an ambitious plan by a private aerospace company gets the go-ahead. The thinking is to save a hefty sum in electricity costs, according to Wu Chunfeng, chairman of

Black holes are a mystery – dense regions of space where there’s so much gravity not even light can escape. They also have a strange relationship with magnetic fields that’s perhaps more mysterious still. We know magnetic fields surround many black holes, but they vary vastly in strength, and we’re not really sure how or

There’s a lot of stuff out there in the dark, far-flung reaches of the early Universe that we’re only just starting to discover. But this one’s a real doozy – the early formation of a huge supercluster of galaxies, located 11 billion light-years away – just 2.3 billion years after the Big Bang. It’s the

Last week, NASA astronaut Air Force Colonel Nick Hague faced death as he and his commander, Alexei Ovchinin, plummeted to Earth following an aborted Soyuz launch. Outside, the world held its breath as the spacecraft returned in what NASA called a “ballistic descent mode“. Inside the tiny capsule, according to Hague, things got pretty rough.

A wee baby star at the tender age of just 2 million years has revealed itself to be quite the precocious little cosmic object. Astronomers have discovered it has not one, but four planets in the protoplanetary disc of dust and gas that surrounds it – and they are all gargantuan, with the biggest coming

Elon Musk is hell-bent on colonizing Mars. That’s the spirit with which he founded SpaceX, his rocket company, in 2002. Musk was frustrated that NASA wasn’t doing more to get people to the red planet – and concerned a backup plan for humanity wasn’t being developed (for when Earth becomes an uninhabitable wasteland). Since then,

For almost two centuries, scientists have theorized that life may be distributed throughout the Universe by meteoroids, asteroids, planetoids, and other astronomical objects. This theory, known as Panspermia, is based on the idea that microorganisms and the chemical precursors of life are able to survive being transported from one star system to the next. Expanding on

An estimated 530 million people around the world had their eyes on NASA astronaut Neil Armstrong as he took one “giant leap for mankind” on July 20, 1969. Armstrong cemented his role in history that day, becoming the first person to step foot on the Moon. Today, walking on the lunar surface is an honour only 11

It’s been a big week for NASA. First the much-loved Hubble Space Telescope entered “safe mode” after one of the gyroscopes that points it in the right direction failed. Then there was a mid-flight failure of a Russian Soyuz rocket on Thursday morning, resulting in the (safe!) emergency landing of cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin and astronaut Nick

An astronaut and cosmonaut survived a harrowing mid-flight failure of a Russian Soyuz rocket on Thursday morning. But human access to space is now on hold indefinitely while authorities investigate the launch failure. After NASA retired its space shuttle fleet in 2011 without a replacement, the US had no American spaceship to fly people to and from the International

Booster rockets carrying a Soyuz spacecraft with a Russian and a US astronaut on board headed for the International Space Station failed mid-air on Thursday, forcing the crew to make an emergency landing. NASA said that the crew was safe and was making an emergency landing in Kazakhstan where the unsuccessful launch took place. “The