Space

The time has come. We’re going to smash a spacecraft into an asteroid. The asteroid is Didymos B, the smaller of the two objects in the Didymos binary asteroid system. The spacecraft is NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART). The reason: to test whether a spacecraft impact can deflect an asteroid’s trajectory, as a means

We’re yet to make a conclusive detection of an exomoon. But if such moons are out there, orbiting planets outside the Solar System, one of them could be responsible for the peculiarities of KIC 8462852 – AKA Tabby’s star. New research suggests that the strange brightening and dimming fluctuations of the star’s light that have

The biggest volcano on Jupiter’s moon Io could be about to blow. Decades of observation have revealed a periodic cycle in the volcano’s eruptions; according to past behaviour, it’s due for the next one any day. That potential burst of activity – or lack thereof – could help us to better understand the volcano and

Last month, we got the exciting news of a rare flash of light on Jupiter, bright enough to be seen through telescopes. According to a new analysis, the cause of this smash was a small asteroid, with a density consistent with meteors that are equal parts stone and iron. The meteor exploded in Jupiter’s upper

Astronomers have identified what could be the most massive neutron star to date.  It’s a pulsar, named J0740+6620, and discrepancies in the timing of its pulses has allowed its mass to be calculated to 2.14 times that of the Sun, packed into a star just 30 kilometres (19 miles) across.  To put that into perspective,

Springtime on Earth can be a riotous affair, as plants come back to life and creatures large and small get ready to mate. Nothing like that happens on Mars, of course. But even on a cold world like Mars, springtime brings changes, though you have to look a little more closely to see them. Lucky

Getting spacecraft into orbit is incredibly costly and difficult, and so scientists keep returning to the idea of a space elevator that can lift people and equipment out of Earth’s atmosphere more easily. Now researchers have come up with a twist on the concept that – in theory at least – is doable with today’s

In the Solar System, there are over 6,300 known comets. There are millions of asteroids. And of all those objects, only ‘Oumuamua – a red, cigar-shaped asteroid – is known to have come from elsewhere. Until now. A new discovery, revealed just last week, has astronomers excited. A comet named C/2019 Q4 (Borisov), discovered on

On August 30, amateur astronomer Gennady Borisov spotted a comet of extrasolar origin passing through our Solar System. This is the second time in as many years that an interstellar object has been observed (the last being ‘Oumuamua 2.0 in 2017). Thanks to the Gemini Observatory, we now have pictures of this comet, making it

The supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way, Sagittarius A*, is usually relatively quiet. It’s not an active nucleus, spewing light and heat into the space around it; most of the time, the black hole’s activity is low key, with minimal fluctuations in its brightness. Most of the time. Recently, astronomers caught

Astronomers have found a supermassive black hole (SMBH) with an unusually regular feeding schedule. The behemoth is an active galactic nucleus (AGN) at the heart of the Seyfert 2 galaxy GSN 069. The AGN is about 250 million light years from Earth, and contains about 400,000 times the mass of the Sun. The team of

SpaceX just posted dramatic footage of its commercial space taxi Crew Dragon undergoing rigorous tests of its emergency abort system. The idea is that if something goes wrong with the rocket carrying the Crew Dragon to orbit, the module can engage its own thrusters to quickly escape the danger – and then coast down safely

A new discovery relating to a rogue star may have just given astronomers a clue towards one of the weirdest mysteries associated with black holes: Where are the middle-sized ones? We know that stellar-mass black holes exist at up to 100 times the mass of the Sun, and supermassive black holes exist that are over 100,000

Hubble has captured a new image of Saturn that makes you wonder if it’s even real. The image is so crisp it makes it look like Saturn is just floating in space. Which it is. This image of the ringed-planet was captured when Saturn was at its closest to Earth, some 1.36 billion km away

Advances in astronomical observation over the past century have allowed scientists to construct a remarkably successful model of how the cosmos works. It makes sense – the better we can measure something, the more we learn. But when it comes to the question of how fast our Universe is expanding, some new cosmological measurements are

When you strike a bell with a hammer, it rings for some time after, as the vibrating metal continues to resonate. And, as it turns out, when you strike a black hole with another black hole, something similar occurs – only instead of sound waves, the newly formed black hole sends gravitational waves rippling out

The region at the centre of our galaxy is still full of mysteries, but astronomers have just found a clue to its past: Huge, radio-emitting bubbles, extending 700 light-years either side of the galactic plane. They could be, the researchers believe, the result of a huge eruption from our galaxy’s supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*.

Astronomers may have spotted the second object ever to visit our Solar System from another star system. The object may even fly near Mars later this year, though it’s still far away. The scientists’ hunch is strong but not yet certain: Right now, the chances are much higher that the object, known as comet “C/2019

In the atmosphere of an exoplanet just 111 light-years away, astronomers have just made a highly exciting discovery: they’ve detected water. As much as 50 percent of the atmosphere of K2-18b could be water vapour. But unlike other giant exoplanets on which atmospheric water has been detected, K2-18b is a super-Earth. It could be rocky,

All the comets in our Solar System may share the same origin story – and it could help explain how life on Earth came to exist. A team of American and European scientists found that 14 different comets originated at the same time and place: a protoplanetary disk orbiting near our newly-formed Sun, according to

Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, might have a more violent past than astronomers realised. A new study suggests that the liquid methane lakes that dot Titan’s surface may have formed when pockets of warming nitrogen exploded below the moon’s surface. This idea would solve a mystery that emerged when NASA’s Cassini mission to Saturn – which

Remember the spectacle of that gigantic telescope unveiled in a mountain-ringed valley in China just a few years ago? Well, the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST) has now picked up a mysterious space signal known as a fast radio burst. Fast radio bursts or FRBs are brief but powerful pulses of energy from distant

Earth’s magnetic poles drift over time. This is something that every airplane pilot or navigator knows. They have to account for it when they plan their flights. They drift so much, in fact, that the magnetic poles are in different locations than the geographic poles, or the axis of Earth’s rotation. Today, Earth’s magnetic north

The Milky Way could be teeming with interstellar alien civilizations, according to a new study. We just don’t know about it because they haven’t paid us a visit in 10 million years. The study, published last month in The Astronomical Journal, posits that intelligent extraterrestrial life could be taking its time to explore the galaxy,

ScienceAlert editor’s update 08/09/2019: ISRO has reportedly found the location of the Vikram lander, after losing contact with it on its descent to the lunar surface on Saturday. They’re yet to determine what condition the lander is in. In an exclusive interview, ISRO Chairman K. Sivan told India Today TV that the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter

Mars is well-known for being a dry and arid place, where dusty red sand dunes are prevalent and water exists almost entirely in the form of ice and permafrost. An upside to this, however, is the fact that these conditions are the reason why Mars’ many surface features are so well preserved. And as missions

About 10,000 light years away, in the constellation Centaurus, is a planetary nebula called NGC 5307. A planetary nebula is the remnant of a star like our Sun, when it has reached what can be described as the end of its life. This Hubble image of NGC 5307 not only makes you wonder about the

The heart of every major galaxy is thought to contain a supermassive black hole – a place where gravity is so strong that anything, including light, gets devoured. Like all black holes, supermassive ones form when stars collapse in on themselves at the end of their life cycles. On average, they’re millions of times more

After 14 years of staring at a dead star, astronomers have once again confirmed Einstein’s theory of general relativity. PSR J1906+0746, a pulsar 25,000 light-years away, slightly wobbles as it spins – an effect that could see its pulses disappear from our sky in less than a decade. It’s called precession, a phenomenon predicted by

SpaceX is scouting for prime real estate to populate Mars, according to a database of NASA spacecraft photography. The database entries suggest the rocket company, founded by the tech mogul Elon Musk, is looking for relatively flat, warm, and hazard-free places to set down its coming launch vehicle, called Starship. A scientist at the University

Assuming life on Earth evolved out of a hearty primordial soup spiced with organic space dust, it’s fair to ask how such life-generating molecules came about in the first place. We now have a much better idea, thanks to a new experiment. Researchers from the US Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have shown how two relatively

The US President has tweeted an American spy satellite image. After some sleuthing, astronomers were able to figure out which satellite it came from: a (formerly) top-secret satellite called USA 224, an optical reconnaissance satellite. Trump’s tweet unwittingly revealed some of the capabilities of American satellite imagery. USA 224 has been kept top-secret for national security

It’s called the Palaeocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM): a monumental and mysterious global warming event that scientists have never been able to fully explain. Well over 50 million years ago, this epic climate abnormality produced a massive injection of carbon into the atmosphere. The build-up lasted some 20,000 years, and sent global temperatures soaring by as

The traffic in Earth’s orbit is getting busier. In space, there are no road rules, and with the number of active satellites on track to increase exponentially in the coming years, experts are increasingly worried about the risk of collisions. On Monday, the European Space Agency (ESA) was forced to move its observation satellite aside

Night and day on Saturn, the Solar System’s show-off, is utterly, devastatingly gorgeous. Sure, it doesn’t have the glittering lights of human habitation, like Earth does; what it does have is its spectacular rings. On Saturn’s night side, its shadow falls across part of its rings, dividing them sharply into night and day with a

The asteroid 6478 Gault first drew attention to itself for sprouting a rare double trail of dust behind it, but now it’s treated astronomers to another surprise: a colour change. Asteroids have never before been caught in the act of shifting colours like this while under real-time observation. In the case of 6478 Gault, a

It was found along the side of a road in a remote Australian gold rush town. In the old days, Wedderburn was a hotspot for prospectors – it occasionally still is – but nobody there had ever seen a nugget quite like this one. The Wedderburn meteorite, found just north-east of the town in 1951,

Chinese lunar rover Yutu-2 has rolled over a strange mystery on the far side of the Moon. At the bottom of a small, recent impact crater, the rover found a shiny unknown substance the Chinese space agency described as a “gel with a mysterious lustre”. Although Chinese scientists have not yet revealed what it might

What comes to mind when you hear the words “artificial intelligence”? Perhaps you think of Apple’s digital assistant, Siri, or Rosie the Robot from The Jetsons? Perhaps you think of Haley Joel Osment as a robot boy in the 2001 film, AI? Elon Musk thinks you’re looking at it all wrong. “I think generally people

Last Wednesday, a gravitational wave detection gave astronomers quite the surprise. As researchers were going about their work at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), a pair of gravitational waves rolled in just minutes apart. The first, labelled S190828j, was picked up by all three of LIGO’s gravitational wave detectors at 06:34 am, coordinated universal time. The

Given the extravagant profusion of moons in our own Solar System, it seems likely that there are way more exomoons out there in the Universe than there are exoplanets. We’re yet to conclusively find one – but astronomers just found a signal that could mean the presence of an exomoon. Not just any exomoon, either,

Here’s a simple how-to on how to construct a traversable cosmic wormhole that could send your spaceship to the furthest reaches of space: take two charged black holes, place them back to back, and thread two cosmic strings through both. Stretch both strings to infinity and presto! You’ve got yourself a traversable wormhole. Confused yet?

How are black holes born? Astrophysicists have theories, but we don’t actually know for certain. It could be massive stars quietly imploding with a floompf, or perhaps black holes are born in the explosions of colossal supernovas. New observations now indicate it might indeed be the latter. In fact, the research suggests that those explosions are so

Development of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has been beleaguered by delays since the project started all the way back in 1996. But a major milestone has brought the finale closer: the glorious machine has now been fully assembled for the first time. The space observatory is being built at the facility of aerospace

In 2017, the Cassini spacecraft plunged into Saturn, ending an exploratory mission that had lasted nearly two decades. But even that final act has proven incredibly useful to scientists, some of whom have now used the data from Cassini’s final transmission to make a remarkable discovery about Saturn: the gas giant’s liquid interior might be

Astronomers have found an exoplanet with an absolute doozy of an orbit. Rather than a nice, more-or-less circular path around its star, the exoplanet HR 5183 b slingshots around more like a comet – a long, elliptical orbit with the star at one end of the oval. It’s the first time any exoplanet has been

After what SpaceX’s founder Elon Musk called an “embarrassing” glitch with Starhopper, an experimental rocket ship, the company pulled off an impressive launch and landing on Tuesday. “Congrats SpaceX team!!” Musk tweeted shortly after the attempt. “One day Starship will land on the rusty sands of Mars.” Starhopper is a roughly 60-foot-tall (18 meters) vehicle

There’s more than one way to look at a galaxy. Once you strip out all the lowest-energy electromagnetic radiation, you’re left with the most powerful processes the Universe can muster. This is the Southern Pinwheel Galaxy, or Messier 83, located around 15 million light-years away in the Southern constellation Hydra. And you are looking at