Space

Microgravity is pretty rough on us ground-dwellers – with bodies no longer constantly acting against gravity, muscle mass and bone density withers away. Even with two hours of exercise daily, it can take months for astronauts to recover their muscle density after a six-month stint on the International Space Station. Bone density can take years

In a comprehensive search of a patch of the Southern sky, not even a hint of alien technology has been detected at low radio frequencies. Across at least 10 million stars that populate the Vela region – the deepest and widest survey for extraterrestrial intelligence yet – the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) in Australia found

The moons of Mars are not quite like our Earth’s Moon. Phobos, the larger of the two, is much closer to its planet; compared to the Moon’s 27-day orbit, Phobos swings around Mars in line with the planet’s equator thrice every Martian day (sol). Solar eclipses, therefore, are much more frequent than those here on

The Chinese government has announced a first – they have successfully landed a reusable spacecraft safely back on Earth after it spent two days in orbit. The spacecraft – called Chongfu Shiyong Shiyan Hangtian Qi (CSSHQ) – was launched September 4 on a Long March-2F carrier from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in northwest China. It

How do you study something invisible? This is a challenge that faces astronomers who study dark matter. Although dark matter comprises 85 percent of all matter in the Universe, it doesn’t interact with light. It can only be seen through the gravitational influence it has on light and other matter. To make matters worse, efforts

If you’re a Star Trek fan, you may think the above image portrays the “Nexus” from the movie Star Trek: Generations. In the film, the Nexus was a ribbon-like extra-dimensional realm that exists outside of normal space-time. But this is actually a real image from the venerable Hubble Space Telescope, of the Cygnus Loop. This stunning picture from

Imagine you could throw the perfect bullseye, but you’d have to wear glasses to do it. That’s a trade-off some space travellers may unwittingly make when they venture off the planet. A study published Friday examined the brains of eight male Russian cosmonauts roughly seven months after they returned from lengthy missions to the International

SpaceX says early tests of its rapidly growing fleet of internet-providing satellites are yielding promising results. Internal tests of a beta version of internet service from the company’s Starlink project show “super low latency and download speeds greater than 100” megabits per second, Kate Tice, a SpaceX senior certification engineer, said during a live broadcast

One of the most powerful solar observatories in the world has just completed a major upgrade. And now, the GREGOR solar telescope in Spain has taken some of the most high-resolution images of our Sun ever obtained in Europe. In the upgraded telescope’s new images, details as small as 50 kilometres (31 miles) across can

A cloud of dust and gas swirling around an infant star system 1,300 light-years away is like no planet-forming disc we’ve seen yet. It consists of three rings, wrapped around three stars – and all three rings have different orientations, with the innermost wildly misaligned from the other two. It’s the first direct evidence that

The Moon is both seductively close to Earth and cosmically far away: Decades after the end of the space race, it remains extraordinarily expensive and difficult to actually get there. The journey just got a bit easier, however, thanks to a freshly published NASA invention. The agency’s patent doesn’t cover a new piece of equipment

The Moon, our closest cosmic neighbour, and the only other body in the Solar System on which humans have set foot, is fairly well known to us. We know that there is practically no air. We know that there is water ice, but no liquid water. So you can understand why the detection of haematite

A tiny bit of air always leaks from the International Space Station – but not quite as much as is leaking now. Officials first noticed a leak last September, but they didn’t do anything about it for nearly a year, since the leak wasn’t major. Plus, station operations like space walks and crew exchanges kept

From 7 billion light-years away, a pair of colliding black holes has delivered up, on a shiny gravitational wave platter, one of the most sought-after detections in black hole astronomy – the extremely elusive ‘middleweight’ black hole, which lies in between stellar-mass black holes and supermassive behemoths. Not only, however, did the two colliding black

With all sorts of rocks flying around willy-nilly in the space around Earth, telescopes around the world are keeping a careful eye on the sky to make sure we’re not in any danger. So when the University of Arizona’s Catalina Sky Survey and the University of Hawaii’s Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System spotted what seemed

When searching for signs of life in the Universe, we tend to look for very specific things, based on what we know: a planet like Earth, in orbit around a star, and at a distance that allows liquid surface water. But there could, conceivably, be other forms of life out there that look like nothing

Galaxies are already pretty huge, billions to trillions of stars whirling around a supermassive black hole. But that’s not where their influence ends. A large, spherical halo of gas surrounds a galaxy, reaching vastly farther than the main population of stars, a bit like a galactic atmosphere. Hubble observations of our nearest galactic neighbour, Andromeda,

Space has never been a one-size-fits-all affair. Our Universe is littered with gas and dust forming the shapes of faces, jellyfish, butterflies, giant pillars that look like a hand, and so much more. And now, for those Star Wars fans out there, there’s TXS 0128+554 – a galaxy that looks very much like a TIE Fighter.

Mars may have only a thin atmosphere compared to other Solar System planets, but boy does it make the most of it. Water ice can rise high in the sky to form thin clouds. Wild winds can whip up into uncontrolled dust storms that shroud the entire planet, or create dust towers that extend almost

SpaceX is aiming to launch three rockets on Sunday, including two back-to-back Falcon 9 launches in Florida and a Starship test flight in Texas, if weather permits. The aerospace company said it intends to launch its twelfth Starlink mission at 10:12 am EST from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, sending 60 Starlinks into orbit. The second

For as long as there has been a Universe, space has been expanding. It winked into existence roughly 13.8 billion years ago, and has been puffing up ever since, like a giant cosmic balloon. The current rate of this expansion is called the Hubble constant, or H0, and it’s one of the fundamental measurements of

Wormholes are a popular feature in science fiction, the means through which spacecraft can achieve faster-than-light (FTL) travel and instantaneously move from one point in spacetime to another. And while the General Theory of Relativity forbids the existence of “traversable wormholes”, recent research has shown that they are actually possible within the domain of quantum

The centre of the Milky Way is glowing. Yes, there’s a big chonkin’ black hole there, and it’s a very energetic region, but there’s an additional high-energy, gamma-ray glow, above and beyond the activity we know about, and it’s something that’s yet to be explained. This glow is called the Galactic Center GeV Excess (GCE),

When a star ventures a little too close to a black hole, we know – broadly – what happens. The intense tidal forces tear the star apart in what is called a tidal disruption event, unleashing a final burst of light before the star’s debris passes beyond the event horizon. The precise details of this

At the end of the Universe, long after the last shining stars flicker out, there might be one final set of explosions. Called black dwarf supernovae, these dazzling blasts will herald in the everlasting darkness as the Universe sinks into dormancy, a new study suggests. These newly proposed supernovas are a special breed that haven’t

The Sun’s corona, its outer atmosphere of searing hot plasma, is a source of constant fascination for scientists – and in a major leap forward in our understanding, researchers have mapped out a region of its global magnetic field for the first time. This magnetic field helps to drive and control many aspects of the

A rare merger between clusters of galaxies has just revealed an even rarer sight. Astronomers have found a vast, low-frequency radio ‘bridge’ between the two, spanning a 6.5-million-light-year distance – evidence of a magnetic field connecting them in the early stage of the merging process. It’s only the second time such a radio bridge has

When Comet NEOWISE streaked by Earth in July, we were dazzled by a plethora of stunning photographs of the twin-tailed space rock. But none were remotely like images taken by the Gemini North telescope in Hawaii. In optical wavelengths, the telescope imaged a stream of dust and molecular gas spiralling out from the nucleus –

Hidden among the seeming endlessness of space, there could be countless worlds that never see the light of day. These mysterious bodies, called rogue planets, are not like other planets, although there could be multitudes of them. In our own Solar System, Earth and all its planetary siblings orbit around the Sun, bathing in its warmth

Radioactive dust deep beneath the ocean waves suggest that Earth is moving through a massive cloud left behind by an exploded star. Continuously, for the last 33,000 years, space has been seeding Earth with a rare isotope of iron forged in supernovae. It’s not the first time that the isotope, known as iron-60, has dusted

Billions of years ago, rain once fell on the Martian plain, and not always softly.  New research on the Red Planet’s now-empty lakes suggests a huge amount of liquid water must have spilled from the skies roughly 3.5 to 4 billion years ago, enough to sculpt river-like channels and breach several lake basins. “This is

Earlier this year, astronomers announced a dazzling discovery. A fast radio burst called FRB 121102 wasn’t just repeating – it was repeating on a discernible cycle. For around 67 days, the source is silent. Then, for around 90 days, it wakes up again, spitting out repeated millisecond radio flares before falling silent, and the whole

If you’ve looked at the news today, you’d be forgiven for thinking a huge asteroid is on track to collide with Earth the day before the 2020 US Presidential election. At least that’s the takeaway from quite a few news outlets. And, understandably, some people are freaking out. In a year with a literal pandemic,

If you’re a fan of science fiction, chances are you encountered a few franchises where humanity has spread throughout the known Universe. The ships that allow them to do this, maybe they use a warp drive, maybe they “fold space,” maybe have a faster-than-light (FTL) or “jump” drive. It’s a cool idea, the thought of

The International Space Station (ISS), in Earth orbit at hundreds of kilometres altitude, is not perfectly airtight. Every day, the cabin loses a minute amount of air, monitored carefully so that a liveable atmospheric pressure can be maintained, and to identify leaks. Now the latter has come to pass, just two years after the last

In 1604, a white dwarf star went supernova. This is quite normal behaviour for a white dwarf star; but this one, at a distance of just 20,000 light-years from Earth, was visible to the naked eye, and documented by astronomers around the world, including German astronomer Johannes Kepler. Kepler’s Supernova, as it came to be

There’s a lot going on in the centre of our galaxy. The Milky Way’s core is home to a supermassive black hole as massive as 4 million Suns called Sagittarius A*, and the environment around it is intense. Blowing out from this region is a nuclear galactic wind. It’s carved out two huge gamma-ray bubbles

Life was trying, but it wasn’t working out. As the Late Devonian period dragged on, more and more living things died out, culminating in one of the greatest mass extinction events our planet has ever witnessed, approximately 359 million years ago. The culprit responsible for so much death may not have been local, scientists now

A car-size asteroid flew within about 1,830 miles (2,950 kilometers) of Earth on Sunday. That’s a remarkably close shave – the closest ever recorded, in fact, according to asteroid trackers and a catalogue compiled by Sormano Astronomical Observatory in Italy. Because of its size, the space rock most likely wouldn’t have posed any danger to people on

Just as you thought it was safe to go back to ignoring Betelgeuse, the red giant star started acting up again. After its first round of dimming, and then brightening, Betelgeuse has now started to dim once again. Moreover, this new dimming is inconsistent with Betelgeuse’s current brightness variation cycle – so, once again, the

Around 15,000 light-years away, an active black hole seems to be periodically lighting up an otherwise unremarkable cloud of gas with gamma rays. But there’s a catch. The gas cloud is around 100 light-years from the black hole – and exactly how the cloud is pulsing in time with it is a mystery. It’s unlikely,

NASA is actively monitoring a strange anomaly in Earth’s magnetic field: a giant region of lower magnetic intensity in the skies above the planet, stretching out between South America and southwest Africa. This vast, developing phenomenon, called the South Atlantic Anomaly, has intrigued and concerned scientists for years, and perhaps none more so than NASA

Earth is a genuinely magical place. We know that’s not the sort of thing you’d expect to read on a science website, but just take a look at the photo above – a pre-dawn picture taken by an Expedition 62 crew member on the International Space Station (ISS) back in March. In this image, taken

The sudden dimming of one of the brightest stars in the night sky, Betelgeuse, could be due to a dust cloud spewing up from its surface, astronomers said on Thursday. The mystery has enthralled skywatchers since the star – part of the Orion constellation – began to lose luminosity last October, with some experts suggesting

NASA’s Mars Odyssey probe has been orbiting the Red Planet for almost 19 years now, making it the longest continually active spacecraft in orbit around a planet other than Earth. That incredible tour of duty means it’s witnessed lots of strange things we can’t easily see from our terrestrial vantage point, and this stunning, colourful

We’ve found the fastest known star in the Milky Way. In the extreme environment at the centre of our galaxy, a newly discovered star called S4714 orbits the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A*. On its orbital journey, S4714 reaches a velocity of around 8 percent of the speed of light – an absolutely jaw-dropping 24,000

One of the world’s most prominent astronomical observatories has a hole. On Monday, a 3-inch-thick (76-mm-thick) cable at the Arecibo Observatory broke, tearing a gash 100 feet (30 metres) long in the reflector dish of the 20-acre radio telescope in Puerto Rico. The observatory had just reopened after a temporary closure due to Tropical Storm

A very long time ago, in the very early Universe, scientists have discovered a galaxy that seems way too advanced to have grown in the short timespan since the Big Bang. It’s called SPT0418-47, and it’s lurking 12.4 billion light-years away – when the Universe was just 1.4 billion years old. What makes it special