Space

Comet NEOWISE – a glowing ball of space ice with two colourful tails – has starred in countless photos as it streaks through the skies across the Northern Hemisphere this week. On Tuesday, three cosmic co-stars joined it, making for an astonishing spectacle. The image above shows a split-second meteor streaking across the sky, the

The first Arab space mission to Mars blasted off Monday aboard a rocket from Japan, after weather delays set back the launch of the probe dubbed ‘Hope’. A live feed of the launch showed the rocket carrying the uncrewed probe, known as “Al-Amal” in Arabic, lifting off from the Tanegashima Space Centre in southern Japan.

As exciting and thrilling as it is to watch all the historic footage from the Apollo Moon landings, you have to admit, the quality is sometimes not all that great. Even though NASA has worked on restoring and enhancing some of the most popular Apollo footage, some of it is still grainy or blurry. But

Ever wondered what space smells like? Well, according to those that have been, it’s a bit burned, a little like gunpowder, has some rum notes, and, if you’re astronaut Tony Antonelli, it’s “a smell that’s different than anything else.” Back in 2008, NASA actually talked with a chemist and director of a fragrance company Steven Pearce to

When magma comes out of the Earth onto the surface, it flows as lava. Those lava flows are fascinating to watch, and they leave behind some unique landforms and rocks. But a lot of what’s fascinating about these flows can be hidden underground, as lava tubes. These lava tubes are turning out to be a

Every now and again, some dead stars called pulsars do something quite odd. They sort of hiccup, making an abrupt acceleration in their rotation speed before – usually – gradually slowing to normal. We’re not sure what causes them; astronomers believe it is some sort of internal process, such as starquakes, or the unpinning of

If we’re going to get serious about long-term space voyages, then being able to patch up injuries will be essential – and that’s no longer a far-off concept. A cosmonaut on board the International Space Station just engineered human cartilage in the microgravity of space for the first time. Bioprinters that can produce human tissue

Neowise is the first bright comet to be visible with the naked eye from the Northern Hemisphere since the mid-1990s. Another thing that makes this comet interesting is that it has a relatively long orbital period, meaning it was only discovered a few months ago. Halley’s comet, for example, takes about 75 years to return

Black holes don’t glow – in fact, they’re famous for doing the opposite. But if they’re actively devouring material from the space around them, that material can blaze like a billion X-ray Suns. And for the first time, astronomers have now seen that blaze mysteriously snuffed out, before gradually returning to brightness. The supermassive black

 A telescope rocketing around the Sun just beamed back the closest images and videos ever recorded of our star, but it’s just getting started on its mission. The Solar Orbiter, built by the European Space Agency (ESA) with help from NASA, flew within 48 million miles (77 million kilometers) of the Sun on June 15

A star discovered hurtling across the Milky Way is so bizarre that astronomers can only conclude it was ejected during a very unusual supernova event. The star – a white dwarf around 1,430 light-years away called SDSS J1240+6710, and nicknamed Dox – is whizzing along at 250 kilometres per second (155 miles per second), against the

A faint and ghostly galaxy 10 million light-years away has delivered one of the holy grails of black hole astronomy. At its heart, lies a black hole that looks to belong to an elusive middleweight class of intermediate-mass black holes, a discovery that could help us understand how some of the most massive black holes

A red dwarf in our Sun’s own back yard seems to have a bad case of indigestion, belching out a flare roughly 20 times more impressive than anything known to come out of our own star. The eruption was caught using a new telescope in Okayama, Japan, when astronomers trained its sights on the constellation

In the darkness of orbital night on July 5, a NASA astronaut floated up to a window on the International Space Station, gazed toward the limb of Earth, and patiently waited for a cosmic spectacle. As the space station careened over the Middle East, the recently discovered Comet NEOWISE and its twin glowing tails rose above the

Looking back through several billion years of history isn’t easy, and new discoveries continually prompt us to rethink just how the Moon came to be. Now, a new study suggests Earth’s satellite is much younger than we tend to think – about 85 million years younger, in fact. Researchers say that lunar rock samples collected on the

The Universe isn’t just a random scattering of galaxies sprinkled throughout an expanding void. The closer we look, the more we see that there are structures – some of which are incomprehensibly vast groupings and clusters of galaxies that are gravitationally bound together. Such a structure has just been discovered arcing across the southern edge

The United Arab Emirates is about to launch its first mission to Mars. It will be the Arab world’s first flight to another planet. The SUV-sized spacecraft, called the Hope probe, will spend seven months travelling to Mars. Once it arrives, Hope will study the red planet’s atmosphere by monitoring how it interacts with solar

By this time next year, Mars will be abuzz with robotic activity. That’s because three countries are sending spacecraft to the red planet this month. In the final weeks of July, the US, China, and the United Arab Emirates all plan to rocket rovers or orbiters into space. NASA has sent five rovers to the

A comet-eating black hole the size of a planet? It’s possible. And if there’s one out there in the distant Solar System, a pair of researchers think they know how to find it. If they do, we might finally put the Planet Nine issue to rest. The researchers are Avi Loeb, a Professor of Science

The human experience of comets is a fleeting phenomenon at best. The dark night sky can reward those gazing upwards with a spectacular vision of these far-travelling objects, but it’s a view that lasts only weeks or months, before these icy bodies continue on their journeys. On 27 March this year, NASA’s space telescope, Near-Earth Object

The center of our very own galaxy might be one of the Universe’s most mysterious places. Astronomers have to probe through thick dust to see what’s going on there. All that dust makes life difficult for astronomers who are trying to understand all the radiation in the center of the Milky Way, and what exactly

Carbon. You might not think about it very much, but you wouldn’t be alive without it. It’s the main ingredient in organic compounds found in all living organisms on Earth, but exactly where carbon comes from has been a matter of some debate. Now, new research has found that the primary source of carbon in

About 370,000 years after the Big Bang, the Universe experienced a period that cosmologists refer to as the “Cosmic Dark Ages.” During this period, the Universe was obscured by a hot dense plasma that obscured all visible light, making it invisible to astronomers. As the first stars and galaxies formed over the next few hundred

It’s fair to say we humans haven’t done a great job of looking after our home planet, and now NASA has published updated guidelines to try and ensure that we don’t end up having a negative impact on the celestial bodies we visit next. These guidelines are known as planetary protection policies – instructions for

Life isn’t always easy for astrophysicists: just when they’ve figured out another aspect of the patterns of movement in our Solar System, along come two of the moons of Neptune to mess everything up. The two moons in question are Naiad and Thalassa, both around 100 kilometres or 62 miles wide, which race around their

Although we usually have a pretty good handle on all the different kinds of blips and blobs detected by our telescopes, it would be unwise to assume we’ve seen everything there is to see out there in the big, wide Universe. Case in point: a new kind of signal spotted by radio telescopes, which has

It’s a captivating idea: build an interstellar ark, fill it with people, flora, and fauna of every kind, and set your course for a distant star! The concept is not only science fiction gold, its been the subject of many scientific studies and proposals. By building a ship that can accommodate multiple generations of human

NASA’s most powerful space telescope, Hubble, captured a uniquely picturesque galaxy in a photo the agency released on Thursday. The galaxy, called NGC 2775, is located 67 million light-years away and doesn’t seem to be forming stars that much anymore. Astronomers can tell that’s the case because of the relatively empty, clear bulge at the

Most of the Solar System is pretty well behaved, but in the distant reaches, out past the orbit of Neptune and far from the light of the Sun, things can get a little… strange. There are a bunch of rocks orbiting the Sun in patterns totally different from the objects found closer in. Because of

A peculiar “gel-like” substance the Chinese Yutu-2 rover discovered in a small impact crater on the far side of the Moon last year has now been identified. According to analysis of the images, and comparison with Apollo samples here on Earth, it’s exactly what you’d expect to find on the Moon: rock. More specifically, it’s

In July of 2015, Breakthrough Initiatives announced that it was embarking on a ten-year initiative to conduct the largest Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) to date. This initiative was aptly named Breakthrough Listen, which combines state-of-the-art software and data obtained by premier observatories around the world to look for signs of extraterrestrial technological activity (aka. technosignatures). In recent

When you go outside and look at the sky on a clear night, it seems like nothing else could be as serene and peaceful. But many of those seemingly peaceful stars are evidence of a turbulent history – and now we’re learning to unlock their secrets. Using data from the Gaia Milky Way mapping survey,

Finding a potentially habitable exoplanet isn’t as easy as you might think. Orbiting at a temperate distance from the host star is just the first step. Size and composition also play a role – as does the level of flare activity in the star. And all of that doesn’t mean much if the system is

Some 730 light-years away, around a star that’s a lot like our Sun, astronomers have found a really weird exoplanet. It’s just a little smaller than Neptune, which could indicate a gaseous planet… but it’s more than twice as massive as Neptune, with a density comparable to Earth and Venus. This super-dense surprise suggests that

We love flyover videos from other worlds. These stunning videos, created from imagery gathered by orbiting spacecraft, can give us a sense of what it would be like to fly in an airplane on another planet. This latest flyover video from the European Space Agency’s Mars Express spacecraft, provides a stunning view of one of

Scientists still aren’t entirely sure how the Moon formed, though plenty of hypotheses have been discussed. Now, new findings around metal deposits in lunar craters could mean we need to rethink those hypotheses again. In short, the findings suggest there are more metals like iron and titanium in the Moon’s craters than we thought there

One of the largest known black holes in the Universe has turned out to have an appetite to match its prodigious size. New measurements reveal that it’s an absolute chonk, clocking in at around 34 billion times the mass of the Sun – and it devours almost one Sun’s worth of mass every day. This

So you want to colonize Mars, huh? Well Mars is a long ways away, and in order for a colony to function that far from Earthly support, things have to be thought out very carefully. Including how many people are needed to make it work. A new study pegs the minimum number of settlers at

For once, we’re going to break with the usual advice and tell you that you very much should stare into the Sun. Specifically, into NASA’s new 10-year timelapse video of activity on the solar surface. Lasting 61 minutes in total, the awe-inspiring video has been produced from high-resolution imagery captured by the Solar Dynamics Observatory

Dropping a mirror on Earth is only minor cause for concern, perhaps about the potential of some upcoming bad luck. Dropping a mirror while on a spacewalk means creating a potentially dangerous new piece of space junk, all while thousands of people watch it happen, streaming live.   A small mirror came loose from International Space

When you picture the Solar System in your head, most people would think of the Sun, stolid and stationary in the centre, with everything else whizzing about around it. But every body in the Solar System also exerts its own gravitational tug on the star, causing it to move around just a tiny bit. Therefore,

Massive stars aren’t like your car keys. They’re not going to disappear under a pile of mail on your kitchen counter, or end up in the washing machine. But a massive star that astronomers were observing for a decade now appears to be totally missing. The star, in the very late stages of its lifespan,

On 2 July 2019, the Moon cast its shadow on the surface of the Earth. This time, the shadow’s path travelled across the South Pacific Ocean. It also passed over some of Argentina and Chile. For surface dwellers in the path, the Moon briefly blocked the Sun, turning night into day. But for one “eye”

How would the Sun look as it dipped below the horizon on a long (17 hour) day on Uranus? Or what would a late-night sunset on Mars look like, when we finally get there? Thanks to some NASA computer modelling, these scenarios are now a little easier to imagine. What makes a sunset is the

On 15 September 2017, NASA’s Cassini Orbiter concluded its mission by diving into Saturn’s atmosphere. Over the course of the 13 years it spent studying the Saturn system, it revealed a great deal about this gas giant and its largest moon, Titan. In the coming years, scientists are eager to send another mission to Titan to follow up on Cassini

In a giant cloud of gas and dust 1,400 light-years away, twin shadows stretch across space from a star, like the vast wings of a colossal cosmic bat. Now astronomers have caught these shadows beating – and they’re not sure what’s causing it. The winged shadow, photographed using Hubble in 2018 and nicknamed the Bat

For the first time, astronomers have seen a flash of light from the collision of two black holes. The objects met and merged 7.5 billion light-years away, within a vortex of hot, swirling matter circling a larger, supermassive black hole. This whirlpool is called the accretion disk, and it orbits a black hole’s event horizon

The search for extraterrestrial life is increasingly homing in on the Solar System’s ocean worlds, and there’s new evidence that Jupiter’s moon Europa should be the first port of call. According to new modelling, Europa’s subsurface oceans should be able to support life. The NASA team behind this research has also calculated that processes such