Space

Saturday 24 August 2019 marked a vexing anniversary for planetary scientists. It was 13 years to the day that Pluto’s official definition changed – what was once numbered among the planets of the Solar System was now but a humble dwarf planet. But not everyone agreed with the International Astronomical Union’s ruling – and now

In the digital age, connectivity and bandwidth are important, even if you’re in Low Earth Orbit (LEO). And when you’re performing research and experiments that could help pave the way for future missions to the Moon, to Mars, and other deep-space destinations, it’s especially important. Hence why NASA recently upgraded the ISS’ connection, effectively doubling

No matter how many images we see of our Solar System, we never get tired of gazing out into space, and the latest pictures of Jupiter are enough to make the jaws of even the most seasoned cosmic observers drop. What you’re looking at in the picture above is a new radio wave image made

A magnetar that recently erupted with a storm of activity may have given us a lead on the mystery of fast radio bursts (FRBs). According to a new analysis of the magnetar XTE J1810-197, millisecond bursts of low-frequency radio waves sputtered out by the dead star show an unusual similarity to FRB signals. It’s far from

The study of exoplanets has matured considerably in the last 10 years. During this time, the majority of the over 4,000 exoplanets that are currently known to us were discovered. It was also during this time that the process has started to shift from the process of discovery to characterization. What’s more, next-generation instruments will

The search for a habitable exoplanet has been a frustrating one. Although we’ve found a bunch of rocky planets orbiting at the right distance from their star, further investigation has so far mostly yielded nothing but barren poisonous rocks lashed with deadly stellar flares. But according to new research using computer modelling to explore the

Rocks on the surface of Ryugu, the distant asteroid currently being explored by the Japanese space probe Hayabusa-2, bear a striking resemblance to rocks from meteorites that have crashed down on Earth. That’s according to a team of European and Japanese scientists who analyzed newly-released photos that Hayabusa-2’s robotic lander, MASCOT, took from the asteroid’s

From where we stand here on Earth, it’s easy to forget our planet is in constant motion. Most traditional time lapses of the Milky Way make it look as though the night sky is rotating around us – but it’s actually the other way around. A dazzling video from astro-photographer Aryeh Nirenberg corrects that perspective, making

How do you weigh a ghost? If you’re a cosmologist, you could use… the Universe. Combine vast cosmological data with info from particle accelerators, and, it turns out, you have a pretty good scale for measuring the mass of a neutrino – also known as the ‘ghost particle’. This is how a team of scientists,

NASA’s 10-year plan involves billions of dollars and spans millions of miles. And much like the universe, it’s only expanding. Last year, the agency announced that it’s planning to send astronauts back to the Moon and eventually build a base there, with a Mars-bound mission to follow in the years after that. In June, the

India’s Chandrayaan 2 spacecraft is now in orbit around the Moon. That means it’s on schedule to touch down on the lunar surface on September 7, according to Agence France-Presse (AFP). If the mission continues as planned, India will become the fourth country to land a spacecraft on the Moon, following Russia, the US, and China

The Universe is expanding, and that expansion is speeding up over time. These two facts have been well established through observation, but we don’t know what’s causing that expansion. It seems to be some mysterious, unknown energy that acts like the opposite of gravity. We call this hypothetical energy “dark energy“, and it’s been calculated

Scientists may have been looking for extraterrestrial life in all the wrong places. Astronomers may have just ruled out life on an entire class of exoplanets. The research, published Monday in the journal Nature, looked specifically at the exoplanet LHS 3844b – a small, rocky planet orbiting a star similar to our Sun. The study

Between its raging heat and intense gravity, the region really close to the Sun is a pretty hazardous place. And that has been spectacularly demonstrated in a new video of a comet, like the legendary Icarus, falling to its doom when it veered a little too close. The comet’s death dive was captured by the

Our galaxy could be littered with warm, watery planets like Earth. That’s the conclusion of researchers at Penn State University, who used data from NASA’s Kepler telescope to estimate the number of Earth-like planets in the Milky Way. Their results, published in The Astronomical Journal this week, suggest that an Earth-like planet orbits one in

The eerie, hellish glow coming from the Moon may seem unreal in this image, since it’s invisible to our eyes. But instruments that detect gamma rays tell us it’s real. More than just a grainy, red picture, it’s a vivid reminder that there’s more going on than meets human eyes. It’s also a reminder that

Astronomers are planning a hunt for the relics of long-dead planets. They just found a big clue in that search: The cores of dead planets can “broadcast” radio waves for up to a billion years, according to a new study published by the Royal Astronomical Society. The waves are caused by interactions between a dead

Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, still wants to drop nuclear bombs on Mars to transform it into a livable planet for humans — as evidenced by his latest tweet on Friday morning. Nuke Mars! — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 16, 2019 Musk believes that by hitting Mars with nuclear weapons, the planet’s polar

It looks like we’ve bagged another win for gravitational wave astronomy. A new gravitational wave detection is the best candidate yet for a type of cosmic collision never seen – the elusive merger between a black hole and a neutron star. The event, called S190814bv, was detected by the LIGO and Virgo interferometers at 11

The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Rosetta mission spent two years at the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. At the end of September 2016, its mission was ended when the spacecraft was sent on a collision course into the comet. During its time at comet 67P, it captured a vast amount of images. The ESA made all those images freely available at

The illustrious Hubble Space Telescope has captured two passing galaxies making contact for the first time. Known as UGC 2369, the featured duo is fated to one day merge and become a single galaxy. But for now, the two galaxies are just getting to know each other. In the image below, the pair can be seen

Jupiter’s core is a bizarre mix of solid rocks mixed with a diffuse bubble of hydrogen gas. And the story of how it got that way has long eluded explanation. But now scientists think they’re on to something, suggesting that the gas giant absorbed another protoplanet during a head-on collision some 4.5 billion years ago

One of the biggest mysteries out there in the Universe is inching closer to answers. An astonishing eight new repeating radio signals known as fast radio bursts (FRBs) have been detected flaring from deep space. At the start of 2019, just one of these mysterious signals, FRB 121102, was known to flash repeatedly. In January,

A peculiar hiccup in the rotation speed of a dead star has turned out to be even more interesting than we thought. For the first time, astronomers have shown that the rotation of the Vela pulsar slowed down immediately before its 2016 glitch. Not only was this completely unexpected, it could help us narrow down

Gigantic interplanetary shockwaves reverberate across our Solar System, originating from the Sun and the bursts of charged particles or solar winds escaping it. But measuring such a shock in detail takes some very finely tuned instruments – and scientists just managed it for the first time. These shocks are made up of particles transferring energy

The supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way, Sagittarius A*, is 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 it

Scientists studying freshly fallen snow in Antarctica have uncovered a rare isotope of iron in the interstellar dust hidden inside it, suggesting the dust showed up recently. This discovery could give us crucial information about the history of stellar explosions in our galactic neighbourhood. We know that cosmic dust is drifting down to Earth all

The Universe is vast beyond imagination, containing billions upon billions of galaxies. We have a pretty good handle on a lot of galactic dynamics, but how these colossal objects form, grow, and change is still something we’re struggling to understand. Enter the UniverseMachine: simulation software run on a powerful supercomputer, able to grow millions of

Picture two tissue box-sized spacecraft orbiting Earth. Then picture them communicating, and using a water-powered thruster to approach each other. If you can do that, then you’re up to speed on one of the activities of NASA’s Small Spacecraft Technology Program (SSTP.) It’s all part of NASA’s effort to develop small spacecraft to serve their

There are few things more special than watching a shooting star streak across the sky on a warm summer evening. Viewers across the United States will have a chance Sunday night into the pre-dawn hours on Monday, as well as Monday night into early Tuesday morning, when a dozen meteors per hour and possibly up

Recently, Jupiter entered a position in the sky known as opposition: almost directly opposite the Sun from Earth. It’s the perfect time for eyeballing our Solar System’s biggest planet – and the Hubble Space Telescope got in on the action. On 27 June, as opposition was waning, Hubble snapped a stunning new photo, revealing Jupiter

Black holes are easily amongst the most enigmatic objects in the Universe, and there’s plenty we still don’t know about how they’re produced and how they evolve. Now, new research suggests a way of finding black hole ‘nurseries’ with the right conditions for spawning massive black hole mergers. Since we first detected gravitational waves in

With Jupiter currently gracing the northern sky at night, it’s a great time to be pointing a telescope at our Solar System’s colossus. But one astrophotographer got the sight of a lifetime – what appears to be the flash of an impact, as something exploded in the planet’s thick upper atmosphere. On 7 August 2019,

SpaceX snatched a rocket nose out of the sky – and CEO Elon Musk posted a video of the moment on Twitter. A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched an AMOS-17 communications satellite at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on Tuesday. The launch took place at 7:23 pm, and the satellite was deployed 31

A horde of microscopic critters called tardigrades were passengers aboard the Israeli spacecraft Beresheet, which crashed into the lunar surface nearly four months ago. But because tardigrates can survive in extreme environments, it’s likely these tiny astronauts are still alive. The microscopic organisms can go without water and oxygen for long periods of time in

Dark matter might well be the biggest mystery in the Universe. We know there’s something out there making things move faster than they should. But we don’t know what it is, and we sure as heck don’t know where it came from. According to a new paper, the origins of dark matter may be more

With Jupiter currently gracing the northern sky at night, it’s a great time to be pointing a telescope at our Solar System’s colossus. But one astrophotographer got the sight of a lifetime – what appears to be the flash of an impact, as something exploded in the planet’s thick upper atmosphere. On 7 August 2019,

You might think that huge galaxies would be hard to miss, but astronomers have just found a whole pile of them billions of light years away. Thirty-nine massive galaxies, invisible until now, are changing our understanding of the early Universe. “This is the first time that such a large population of massive galaxies was confirmed

Black holes can get pretty big, but there’s a special class that is the biggest of the big, absolute yawning monster black holes. And astronomers seem to have found an absolute specimen, clocking in at 40 billion times the mass of the Sun. It’s at the centre of a galaxy called Holmberg 15A, a supergiant

Two separate prototypes of SpaceX’s Starship rocket could be ready to fly before the end of August, CEO Elon Musk revealed to the Twittersphere on Saturday – though it’s not clear whether the debut would be a short hop or a historic orbital adventure. On August 24, SpaceX will hold a presentation in Boca Chica,

On 6 August 2012, after an epic six-month journey, NASA rover Curiosity finally arrived at her new home on Mars. This week marks seven Earth years since touchdown, and we’re celebrating Curiosity’s Landing Day with some of the marvels it has brought us. It’s an isolated existence for the little rover, all alone in the

On Wednesday, July 24th, the people of the Great Lakes region were treated to a spectacular sight when a meteor streaked across the sky. The resulting fireball was observed by many onlookers, as well as the University of Western Ontario’s All-Sky Camera Network. This array runs across southern Ontario and Quebec and is maintained in

Just like our own Milky Way, most of the universe’s galaxies are shaped like spirals, with long swirling arms of cosmic matter stemming from a bright core. Still, they don’t always appear like that to us. When viewed from the side, spiral galaxies can look deceivingly linear, as a new image from the Hubble Space

Another ancient star has been found lurking in the Milky Way. Around 35,000 light-years away, a red giant star named SMSS J160540.18–144323.1 was found to have the lowest iron levels of any star yet analysed in the galaxy. This means that it’s one of the oldest stars in the Universe, probably belonging to the second

Astronauts on board the International Space Station (ISS) have to do just about everything for themselves. Living within this constantly orbiting laboratory, they’re not only crew members, they’re also plumbers, janitors and housekeepers. Just last week, in fact, the team of six astronauts currently on board began a month-long chore that requires taking their trash

Astrobiologists have sent 18 different strains of bacteria up to the International Space Station. They’re not meant to contaminate the already-kinda-gross orbital research center, but rather to determine whether the mineral-leaching microbes could help astronauts mine space rocks during future missions, Space.com reports. If the so-called BioRock experiment pans out, the researchers behind the experiment

The most comprehensive and widely-held theory of how the Moon formed is called the ‘giant impact hypothesis.’ That hypothesis states that about 150 million years after the Solar System formed, a roughly Mars-sized planet named Theia collided with Earth. Though the timeline is hotly-debated in the scientific community, we know that this collision melted Theia

A star with an interrupted death sequence could be the progenitor of a type of star that’s totally new to science. Astronomers have just discovered type of very small, very hot star that brightens and dims every few minutes as its outer layers try to maintain equilibrium. The stars have been named hot subdwarf pulsators, and they