A star system located some 16,000 light-years away from Earth is flaring in an unexpected manner, and scientists are working to explain what’s going on with it. The star in question is called AG Draconis: a well-known binary star that’s been observed by astronomers since the late 19th century. But while AG Draconis may have

You know how stars do. They’re out there, doing their thing, fusing a whole bunch of hydrogen into helium, shining up the joint. But some stars are just a little bit different from the norm. Not content with simply lighting up the night sky like a giant disco, they zoom, shimmer, dim and even hang

A strange feature on the surface of Mars has kept scientists guessing about its origin. It’s a surface deposit of a mineral which is more common in the interiors of planets. A new study shows that this interior mineral was probably brought to the surface by an ancient explosive volcano. Nili Fossae is located in

Humans and our primate relatives differ in many ways, but the fact we walk on two legs is one of the most obvious. Precisely how our ancestors evolved that trait is a well-debated mystery. Now, there’s a new idea. What if one of the contributing factors was giant explosions in the sky? It’s not as

A stunning image of Earth taken from the orbital perspective of the International Space Station (ISS) gives a unique glimpse of an everyday phenomenon too easily taken for granted. In a photo posted to Twitter last week, NASA astronaut Christina H. Koch showed what it looks like from the ISS as darkness creeps over one

The first launch this year of a Roscosmos Soyuz 2-1b rocket from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in Russia went off without a hitch. Yes, even despite a bolt of lightning that struck the booster as it made its ascent. At 06:23 UTC on Monday 27 May, the rocket lifted off to deliver a Glonass-M navigation satellite

Last week SpaceX launched 60 Starlink telecommunication satellites – the first major launch of its ambitious fleet of up to 12,000 satellites, with the goal to eventually create ultra-fast internet services around the world. The launch of the 227 kg (500 pound) satellites went off without a hitch, but a spectacular video of the ‘train’

South Africa’s Makhonjwa Mountains are home to some of the oldest rocks on the planet – but not everything in this magnificent landscape originated on Earth. Scientists say they’ve discovered trace evidence of extraterrestrial organic matter buried within volcanic sediment from over 3.3 billion years ago. “This is the very first time that we have found

Humans may not be able to burp properly in space, but we can now edit a genome. For the first time, astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) have used CRISPR-Cas9 to edit the DNA of brewer’s yeast. The goal wasn’t to create super space yeast. The astronauts were studying how DNA repair mechanisms work

There’s no sense in sugar-coating it – Venus is a hellish place! It is the hottest planet in the Solar System, with atmospheric temperatures that are hot enough to melt lead. The air is also a toxic plume, composed predominantly of carbon dioxide and sulfuric acid rain clouds. And yet, scientists hypothesize that Venus was

Somewhere in the outer reaches of the Solar System, beyond the orbit of Neptune, something wonky is happening. A few objects are orbiting differently from everything else, and we don’t know why. A popular hypothesis is that an unseen object called Planet Nine could be messing with these orbits; astronomers are avidly searching for this planet. But

Earth will be getting not one but two visitors from space this weekend. Astronomers expect an asteroid known as 1999 KW4 to swing by the Earth at around 7:05 p.m. ET on Saturday — and when it does, it’ll bring along its very own moon. “It’s one of the closest binary flybys probably in recent

SpaceX, the rocket company founded by Elon Musk, successfully launched its first five dozen Starlink telecommunications satellites on Thursday night. If all goes according to plan in the coming weeks, the new fleet of experimental spacecraft may pave the way for a global, ultra-fast, and lucrative internet product, possibly within a couple of years. “Starlink

Mars and Earth may have a lot of things in common, but the processes that sculpt their sand dunes are not among them. Exactly how Martian sand moves around crevasses and impact craters has been something of a mystery – but we might finally have a better idea. Planetary scientists have comprehensively revealed how the

China attempted to launch a top-secret military payload into space early Thursday morning, but the attempt ended in a rain of wreckage. The loss of the Long March 4C rocket and its satellite marks the nation’s second launch failure of 2019. The first was a commercial launch in March by the Chinese aerospace startup OneSpace.

Sometimes planets turn up where you least expect – such as in data from the Kepler space-hunting telescope that had already been analysed. It’s there that astronomers have found a treasure trove – 18 Earth-sized exoplanets, including one that may be habitable. The largest is a little over twice the size of Earth. The smallest,

NASA has chosen 11 American companies to help them build the next lunar landers that will carry humans to the surface of the Moon. The 11 companies will conduct studies and work on prototype landers in the coming years. It’s all part of NASA’s Artemis mission, and the mission’s 2024 date with the surface of

You may not realise it, because we always see the same side of it from Earth, but the Moon is pretty weird. The side we see is very different from the far side, which is always facing away from us, and the contrast between these two sides has been a baffling oddity. Now we have a

The Solar System might be a soggier place than we previously thought – even in the glacially cold reaches of the Kuiper Belt. There, dwarf planet Pluto could be harbouring liquid oceans under a shell of nitrogen ice. It was thought that the temperature required to maintain a liquid ocean on Pluto was too high

Using the combined might of two of Hawaii’s powerful telescopes, astronomers have captured what they are describing as “groundbreaking” sharp new images of a planetary system still in the process of being born.  They also found no evidence of three previously detected planets. The star is LkCa 15, a young, Sun-like T Tauri star 473

In the Chinese science fiction film The Wandering Earth, recently released on Netflix, humanity attempts to change the Earth’s orbit using enormous thrusters in order to escape the expanding Sun – and prevent a collision with Jupiter. The scenario may one day come true. In five billion years, the Sun will run out of fuel

The world watched avidly earlier this year when NASA spacecraft New Horizons made a historic encounter. It flew past an object called 2014 MU69 – AKA Ultima Thule – the farthest named single object in the Solar System. We know what it looks like. We know it’s a bit of a weirdo. But now scientists

Yutu 2, the Chinese rover that landed on the far side of the Moon earlier this year, just examined the first-ever samples of the Moon’s mantle. The samples are believed to have been dug out by a meteorite impact so strong that it crashed through the Moon’s crust, according to research published in the journal

Scientists say that something mysterious punched gigantic, cosmic “bullet holes” in parts of the Milky Way. There’s a string of holes in a long stream of stars called GD-1 that suggests that some yet-undiscovered thing blasted its way through, according to research presented to the American Physical Society last month. Harvard-Smithsonian astrophysicist Ana Bonaca, the

A strange kind of yellow, exotic glass found across some of the world’s desert regions has finally had its mysterious origins identified – almost 30 million years after it formed on Earth. Libyan desert glass is a naturally occurring kind of glass that’s found in the eastern stretches of the Sahara desert, in eastern Libya

Only 12 people have ever travelled so far as to touch the brightest object in our night sky – the Moon. All of these astronauts were male. If the very first lunar mission was a small step for man, the next shall be a giant leap for women. At the start of this week NASA

Around 620 light-years away from Earth lies KELT-9b – by far the hottest planet we have ever found. It’s so hot that vaporised iron and titanium are scattered throughout its atmosphere, as researchers discovered last year. But it turns out it gets even more intense. Exoplanet scientists have now found a bunch of other vaporised

We tend to think of the Moon as the archetypal “dead” world. Not only is there no life, almost all its volcanic activity died out billions of years ago. Even the youngest lunar lava is old enough to have become scarred by numerous impact craters that have been collected over the aeons as cosmic debris

Elon Musk just gave us the first look at his rocket company’s bold plan to bring ultra-high-speed internet to the entire world. Musk tweeted out an image of 60 satellites packed into SpaceX’s Falcon rocket on Saturday, along with fresh details about the global satellite networking gambit. SpaceX currently plans to launch the rocket on

At the University of California, Santa Barbara, researchers with the UCSB Experimental Cosmology Group (ECG) are currently working on ways to achieve the dream of interstellar flight. Under the leadership of Philip Lubin, the group has dedicated a considerable amount of effort towards the creation of an interstellar mission consisting of directed-energy light sail and

Our first picture of a black hole was a huge moment for science. But we can’t stop there. We need better pictures that deliver more information. That’s how we’ll learn even more about these strange, rule-breaking behemoths. Now a group of astronomers from the Radboud University in the city of Nijmegen, Netherlands, along with the European Space

On Thursday, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin presented its plans to reach the Moon, including a brand new design for its “Blue Moon” lander. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk then took to Twitter to crudely imply that Bezos was building unwarranted hype for a plan that wasn’t going anywhere — a move that

Jeff Bezos’ private space company Blue Origin revealed its long-awaited plans to go to the Moon at a mysterious press event today. Bezos showed off a brand new design of its “Blue Moon” lander, which is designed to carry 6.5 tons (5.9 tonnes) to the surface of the Moon. According to Bezos, the Blue Origin

There are few things that tether us more to Earth than the food we eat and the air we breathe. Today, humans have the engineering willpower to travel to the Moon and possibly beyond, but when our planet recedes behind us and we slip beyond the reach of human aid, then what? In the absence

The Universe didn’t begin as we see it today, glittering with light. For the first 500 million or so years, it was a murky, neutral hydrogen-filled darkness. Then something started exciting the hydrogen with radiation, ionising it – and lo, there was light. We don’t know what ultimately caused that first ultraviolet light to shine.

The faint, flickering distortions of space-time we call gravitational waves are tricky to detect, and we’ve only managed to do so in recent years. But now scientists have calculated that these waves may leave more persistent traces of their passing – traces we may also be able to detect. Such traces are called ‘persistent gravitational

A violent collision between two neutron stars 4.6 billion years ago showered the as-yet-unformed Solar System with heavy elements, new research has found. As much as 0.3 percent of Earth’s gold, platinum and uranium (along with other heavy elements) could have been forged in the fire of a merger 1,000 light-years away, when the Solar

Thanks to recent groundbreaking observations, we now know that two colliding black holes produce gravitational waves – ripples in the fabric of space-time. It was thought that the waveform (or shape) of the signal produced by these events was too complex to be calculated, but now a theoretical astrophysicist has done just that. In a

On 29 April, 2027, a terrible and world-changing event occurred. A 60-metre (200-foot) asteroid called 2019 PDCentered Earth’s atmosphere at a shocking speed of 19 kilometres per second (43,000 mph) and impacted over New York’s Central Park. Up to 20 megatons of energy were released in the airburst – 1,000 times the energy of the

Never heard of the Eta Aquarid meteors? 2019 offers a good chance to check out this normally obscure meteor shower. This year offers an especially good chance to spy these fast-moving meteors. First off, the peak for this shower arrives on the morning of Monday, May 6 less than 40 hours after the New Moon.

A massive asteroid will be visible to the naked eye when it passes close to Earth within the same distance as spacecraft that orbit the planet, according to NASA. The 1,100-foot-wide rock named 99942 Apophis will shoot across the sky like a “moving star-like point of light”, getting brighter and faster on Friday April 13

The Hubble Space Telescope has been giving us amazing images of far flung regions of space since it was launched back in 1990. But, even after all this time, it still finds ways to blow us away. Like this patchwork of deep field images just released, showing off 265,000 galaxies and stretching back billions of

We’ve seen black hole mergers. We’ve seen that incredibly memorable neutron star merger. Now the LIGO-Virgo collaboration seems to be mixing it up, with what could be the first ever gravitational wave detection of a black hole devouring a neutron star. It’s only just come in, a burst of unusual gravitational waves, ripples in the

After a lengthy investigation, NASA has finally pinned down the reason two science missions failed to launch. A supplier had been sending faulty aluminium for rocket parts – after fraudulently altering test results and falsifying certifications. The supplier was Sapa Profiles, Inc. (SPI), an Oregon-based aluminium extrusion manufacturer, and it had been perpetrating its fraud

Remember when Orson Welles’ 1938 radio show called “The War of the Worlds” fooled people into thinking that Earth was actually being invaded? That was fun. Now, the ESA (European Space Agency) is tempting fate by live-tweeting the hypothetical approach of the hypothetical asteroid 2019PDC and hypothetically planning a hypothetical response to this hypothetically destructive

One of the most recognisable star formations in our galaxy could be harbouring an intergalactic fugitive.  Hiding in the Ursa Major constellation, home of the Big Dipper, astronomers have recently ousted a strange star unlike any other in the Milky Way. Officially known as J1124+4535, this bizarre celestial body appears to have an unusual chemical signature and, incidentally, origin.

Samples of the asteroid Itokawa sent back to Earth from Japan’s Hayabusa probe are finally revealing their secrets – including the fact that they’re rich in water. Cosmochemists have analysed tiny fragments in the samples, and for the first time measured the water content within. They have determined that asteroids like Itokawa bombarding Earth billions

The first ever tentative detection of a moon outside our Solar System has been called into question. In follow-up analyses of the data, astronomers have failed to detect the faint dip in the light of a star that would indicate the presence of a planet’s moon passing by. In separate papers, two teams performed independent