One minute, you’re chilling on a mountain. The next you’re being dwarfed by the biggest Moon you’ve ever seen – one that seems to be coming right down to rest on Earth’s surface. That’s what appears to be happening in this video on NASA’s Astronomy Picture of The Day (APOD) site for 4 June 2018.

Next time you’re feeling down, you beautiful thing, just remember – you’re made of stardust. Of course, so are faecal bacteria. And serial killers. Not to mention the food you hate eating, rust, arsenic… but even so, it’s amazing to think that the materials in our cells once came from somewhere in the sky. But

In a little over four weeks, the Moon will turn a shade of rust and loom larger in the sky than usual in a relatively rare astronomical event.  For the half of the planet fortunate enough to see it, it’s a chance to see two fascinating spectacles combined in what’s known as a ‘super blood

According to one of the astronauts aboard NASA’s 1968 Apollo 8 mission, it would be “stupid” and “almost ridiculous” to pursue a crewed mission to Mars. “What’s the imperative? What’s pushing us to go to Mars? I don’t think the public is that interested,” said Bill Anders, who orbited the Moon before returning to Earth

You’ve heard of hot Jupiters. You’ve heard of mini-Neptunes. You’ve heard of super-Earths. But have you heard of Eyeball Planets? Yep – planetary scientists think there might be a type of exoplanet out there that looks disturbingly like a giant eyeball. Just sitting there. Staring. But it’s actually not as weird as it sounds –

According to a straightforward interpretation of general relativity, the Big Bang wasn’t the start of ‘everything’. Taking Einstein’s famous equations at face value and making as few assumptions as possible, a team of researchers has rewound the clock on our Universe to find it wouldn’t lead to a stopping point at all, but would take

Black holes are vast, matter-annihilating objects that seem to defy physics by their very existence. They’re so weird, that when Albert Einstein’s equations first predicted the existence of these beasts, he didn’t believe they could actually be real. And you can’t really blame him, because the idea that we have these singularities of space-time intent

On 24 December 1968 – 50 years ago this Christmas eve – Apollo 8 astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and William Anders became the first humans to circle the Moon. The mission was historic. But equally memorable is the famous “Earthrise” photo that resulted, showing Earth rising above the lunar landscape. Until that point, no

In an incredible world first, astrophysicists detected multiple planets in another galaxy earlier this year, ranging from masses as small as the Moon to ones as great as Jupiter. Given how difficult it is to find exoplanets even within our Milky Way galaxy, this is no mean feat. Researchers at the University of Oklahoma achieved

Groundbreaking physicist Stephen Hawking left us one last shimmering piece of brilliance before he died: his final paper, detailing his last theory on the origin of the Universe, co-authored with Thomas Hertog from KU Leuven. The paper, published in the Journal of High Energy Physics in May, puts forward that the Universe is far less complex

Astronomers at the M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea, Hawaii made an incredible discovery earlier this month. It was a rare relic of the ancient universe: a “fossil cloud” of gas created around the time of the Big Bang. The extraordinary discovery could provide new information about the origins of the universe and its early composition

There are reports of a major cosmic heist. New research shows that Mars, once thought to host a methane-rich atmosphere, now seems to be devoid of the organic molecule, Universe Today reports. If you follow space news, you may recall the excitement in 2003 and 2004 when scientists at NASA and the European Space Agency

From the Neolithic to present times, the amount of sunlight we see in a day has had a profound impact on human culture. We are fast approaching the winter solstice for the Northern hemisphere, which takes place on December 21. This is the longest night of the year – once celebrated as “Yule” by the

We still don’t know what dark matter is, but new research has brought us closer to figuring out where it might sit. According to astrophysicists from Australia and Spain, the starlight that lingers between massive clusters of galaxies is a giant signpost that as good as says “DARK MATTER IS HERE”. In fact, they claim,

At the outer reaches of the known Universe, entire galaxies - and all of the stars, planets, and alien species they may contain – are disappearing. Of course, these objects aren’t simply evaporating. They are being thrust out of the known Universe, forced into a mysterious expanse known as the “unobservable Universe.” However, in order to

While the presence of liquid water on Mars remains an ongoing topic of intense interest, we know that there is plenty of water ice adorning the Red Planet – and boy can it ever look amazing, as new images from the European Space Agency’s Mars Express attest. The Mars orbiter has obtained a stunning view

Precious stones might be relatively rare and hidden deep underground here on Earth, but space is an absolute treasure chest. Astronomers have found a new class of planets, and they’re so abundant in the compounds that make sapphires and rubies, they could be positively sparkling. These planets are a type of super-Earth - dense planets like Earth

Scientists have known for some time that Earth’s atmosphere loses several hundred tons of oxygen each day. They understand how this oxygen loss happens on Earth’s night side, but they’re not sure how it happens on the day side. They do know one thing though; they happen during auroras. According to a press release from

Whatever you’re doing for your New Year’s celebrations, it’s not going to be as awesome as New Horizons. On New Year’s Day, the space probe will zoom right up close past an object in the Kuiper Belt called 2014 MU69 – nicknamed Ultima Thule. This will make Ultima Thule the farthest Solar System object to

All the planets in our Solar System have their charms, but few are as flashy and iconic as Saturn’s glorious rings. But, like everything in the Universe, they’re not going to last forever – and now planetary scientists have discovered that they’re disappearing at an incredibly fast rate. Well, fast in planetary terms. The rings

When it comes to events in space, 2019 is going to be an extraordinary year. That’s not to say 2018 will be an easy act to follow. After all, SpaceX debuted the world’s most powerful operational launch system (called Falcon Heavy), sent a car beyond Mars, and helped lift off more orbital rockets than in

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