Last year, a global collaboration of scientists made history by unveiling the very first direct image of a black hole. Now, we have a magnificent follow-up – the closest-ever look at a violent jet spewed forth by a supermassive black hole.   That supermassive black hole sits at the heart of a quasar 5 billion

We could all use a distraction or two right now, and what better way to take your mind off what’s happening on this planet than by gazing at another celestial body? This Wednesday 8 April you’ll be able to see a ‘super pink Moon’ in the night sky.   It won’t actually be pink, but

An exciting pair of white dwarf stars spiralling in towards one another just became the latest addition to a promising pool of gravitational wave sources we could detect in the near future.   Of course, epic stellar amalgamations are the ultimate fate of many binary systems, when stars lean in too close to their dancing

I know you’re googling “flocculent” right now, unless you happen to be a chemist, or maybe a home brewer. You could spend each day of your life staring at a different galaxy, and you’d never come remotely close to seeing even a tiny percentage of all the galaxies in the Universe.   Of course, nobody

Welp, that’s clinched it. It seems like it really is the end of the road for 2I/Borisov, a comet that travelled light-years across space before winding up in the Solar System. New data show that the comet is coming apart.   The most recent Hubble observations of the comet suggest that the comet has broken

Black holes are sneaky. They lurk out there in the dark, not giving off any detectable radiation, making them very hard to find. But they have a weakness: they’re extremely messy eaters. And this propensity has allowed astronomers to zero in on something elusive: the “missing link” middleweight black hole.   A colossal X-ray flare

If we humans want to go live on the Moon – which we are planning to do – we’re going to have to have something to actually live in. Small landers may have worked for the brief duration of the Apollo missions, but for longer-term stays, we’re going to need something a bit more permanent.

Mars. Water. You’d never find two more unlikely companions, even in a buddy cop movie. But once upon a time, the dry, red dustbowl of Mars was lush and soggy. We’re still unravelling the history of that water, and planetary scientists have just discovered at least two distinct reservoirs of ancient water could be preserved

In the far reaches of the Universe, astronomers have managed to capture a rare interaction. As a supermassive black hole ravenously slurps down matter around it, it’s sending out jets of plasma – pushing into and heating the gas in the galaxy around it.   This is difficult to capture at the best of times,

In 2015, astronomers found something weird. It was a white dwarf star, 570 light-years from Earth, with a peculiar dimming pattern. It dimmed several times to varying depths, each depth repeating on a 4.5 to 5-hour timeframe; and its atmosphere was polluted with elements usually found in rocky exoplanets.   It didn’t take long before

Despite humanity’s current struggle against the novel coronavirus, and despite it taking up most of our attention, other threats still exist. The very real threat of a possible asteroid strike on Earth in the future is taking a backseat for now, but it’s still there.   Though an asteroid strike seems kind of ephemeral right

Once again, a search for signs of dark matter outside its gravitational effect has turned up zilch – but this time it’s a little more controversial. Astronomers peering into empty space have not found an X-ray glow hypothesised to be the product of one particular dark matter candidate: the sterile neutrino.   It is, the

Poor old Uranus just can’t seem to catch a break. Something already tipped the planet on its side, so its orbit is perpendicular to those of the other Solar System planets. It probably smells terrible. And now scientists have discovered that the atmosphere of Uranus is leaking out into space.   Hidden in the data

It’s well known that quasars are the most luminous galaxies in the Universe, spewing insane amounts of radiation across space as their supermassive black holes rapaciously devour material from a colossal accretion disc.   Well, they just got even more hardcore. Astronomers have discovered that blasts of radiation emanating from quasars can act like a

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) delivers once again! Using its advanced imaging instrument, the High Resolution Imaging Experiment (HiRISE) camera, the orbiter captured a breathtaking image (shown below) of the plains north of Juventae Chasma.   This region constitutes the southwestern part of Valles Marineris, the gigantic canyon system that runs along the Martian equator.

Scientists have found naturally occurring superconducting materials in extraterrestrial objects for the first time, discovering superconductive grains embedded inside two distinct meteorites that crash-landed on Earth.   The discovery is just the latest to show that meteorites are much more than space debris that falls out of the sky. Recent investigations have turned up meteorite-borne

When you’re right in the middle of something, it’s pretty hard to tell exactly how big it is. Like the Milky Way galaxy, for instance. We can’t exactly go take a picture of it from the outside, so our best estimates rely on distance measurements to objects on the outskirts.   An estimate based on

While we’re on Earth grappling with one of the biggest pandemics in modern memory, NASA’s Curiosity rover is still pottering around Mars, probably enjoying the serenity – just as it has been for the last eight years.   We’re still receiving great selfies from the rover, too. Just last month, on February 26, Curiosity took

A comet that entered our Solar System from interstellar space may not make it out again. As it zooms away from the Sun, 2I/Borisov has been spotted spewing out material in two cometary outbursts.   These outbursts show that the comet is disintegrating, according to Polish astronomers from the Jagiellonian University in Krakow and the

NASA said it has suspended work on building and testing the rocket and capsule for its Artemis crewed mission to the Moon due to the rising number of coronavirus cases in the community.   The space agency is shutting down its Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans, where the Space Launch System rocket is being

Every planet in our Solar System, including our own, is enclosed in a bubble of solar wind, emanating from our Sun at supersonic speeds. The particles making up this wind create an invisible magnetic field, which protects us from the rest of interstellar space. For decades now, astronomers have been analysing this system of radiation

Mercury has a reputation, one largely informed by where it exists – closer to the Sun than any other planet in the Solar System. That unforgiving proximity means Mercury gets hot. Really hot.   Daytime temperatures on Mercury can reach a scorching 430 °Celsius (800 °Fahrenheit), but they also plummet to –180 °C (–290 °F)

From our vantage point here on the surface, it might not seem like it sometimes, but we live on a breathtakingly gorgeous world. And it’s incredibly special. Of all the over 4,000 exoplanets scientists have found out there in the wider galaxy so far, none is exactly like Earth.   Unfortunately, most of us are

NASA’s InSight lander, which is currently on the surface of Mars, has faced some unexpected problems during its mission to explore and study the planet. Namely, a digging probe that was built to burrow beneath the surface like a jackhammer got stuck because Mars’ soil is clumpier than scientists expected, Popular Science reports.   After

A year ago, history was made. The long, painstaking work of scientists around the globe produced the very first direct image of the event horizon of a black hole, a supermassive monster called M87* 55 million light-years away. That glorious, golden, blurry image confirmed many of our ideas about black holes.   But the science

Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way, isn’t exactly rowdy. It’s not classified as an active galactic nucleus – one of those galactic cores that glow exceedingly brightly as they feast on copious amounts of material from the surrounding space.   However, the brightness of our galaxy’s centre does

The prospects of ancient life forming on Mars just got a little more likely. Scientists have determined that in the planet’s distant past, conditions could have been just right for the formation of RNA molecules.   If that was the case, life could have formed on Mars consistent with the RNA World hypothesis – the

We’re in uncharted territory as the world faces the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. While the medical community is on the front lines of dealing with this, as well as others who provide critical services in our communities, the best thing many of us can do is to stay home (and wash our hands).   If you’re

To date, we humans have positively identified over 4,000 exoplanets in the Milky Way galaxy. And, to date, all of those exoplanets have something in common: they’re located in the relatively flat disc of the galactic plane, the thin disc.   Now, a little over a year and a half after it started scanning the

Uranus is quite the individual. Most of the planets in our Solar System have their poles more or less oriented in the same direction. And most of them are spinning anticlockwise, when viewed from above. But Uranus? Its rotation axis is oriented 98 degrees relative to its orbit, and it’s whirling around in a clockwise direction.

A joint Russian-European mission to Mars has been postponed for two years, the Russian and European space agencies said Thursday, citing the novel coronavirus and technical issues.   “We have made a difficult but well-weighed decision to postpone the launch to 2022,” said Dmitry Rogozin, head of Russia’s Roscosmos agency. The unmanned ExoMars mission aims to

There’s a problem with the accelerating rate of the expansion of the Universe. More specifically, there’s a problem with how we measure the accelerating rate of the expansion of the Universe, called the Hubble Constant. We have two major methods for measuring the Hubble Constant, and no matter how many times we apply them, they

A project to map dark energy in the southern sky has brilliantly exceeded its parameters. It turns out, the Dark Energy Survey has also been adept at identifying really small objects all the way out past Neptune.   In its first four years of data, astronomers have successfully identified 316 minor planets, 139 of which

How big is a neutron star? These extreme, ultra-dense collapsed stars are fairly small, as far as stellar objects are concerned. Even though they pack the mass of a full-sized star, their size is often compared to the width of a medium-to-large-sized city.   For years, astronomers have pegged neutron stars at somewhere between 19

Astronomers have discovered the existence of a supermassive black hole that looks to be the oldest and most distant of its kind we’ve ever encountered – and it just happens to be aiming its bright particle beam directly at Earth.   The newly found supermassive black hole – called PSO J030947.49+271757.31 – is the most

Astronomers have used an algorithm based on the growth patterns of slime mould to map something that’s basically impossible to see: the cosmic web of gas and dark matter underpinning the very structure of the Universe.   Slime mould (Physarum polycephalum) is one of the weirdest life forms on the planet, but we shouldn’t underestimate

In the constellation of Pisces, 391 light-years from Earth, sits a hell-planet. The gas giant WASP-76b whips around its star at a breakneck orbit of just 1.8 days, and those days are brutal, with temperatures in excess of 2,400 degrees Celsius (4,350 Fahrenheit) – hot enough to vaporise iron.   But where day turns to

The building blocks of life can, and did, spontaneously assemble under the right conditions. That’s called spontaneous generation, or abiogenesis. Of course, many of the details remain hidden to us, and we just don’t know exactly how it all happened.   Or how frequently it could happen. The world’s religions have different ideas of how

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx is getting closer, physically and temporally, to its primary goal. The spacecraft arrived at Bennu at the end of 2018, and for just over a year it’s been studying the asteroid, searching for a suitable sampling site.   To do that, it’s getting closer and closer. OSIRIS-REx stands for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource

It’s lonely out there in deep space. Especially when a spacecraft has travelled so far into the vast emptiness, interstellar space is now all it can truly call home. Of course, this was always Voyager 2’s fate. The spacecraft – which launched over 40 years ago and now stands as NASA’s longest-running space mission – was

The Universe has yielded another surprise, and this time, it’s practically under our very noses. Just 1,500 light-years away, astronomers have found a star that pulsates – but only on one side. Although such an object was predicted decades ago, this is the first time we’ve actually seen it.   “We’ve known theoretically that stars

Around 4.5 billion years ago, something the size of Mars collided with a newly formed Earth, to colossal effect. This object is not only thought to have fused with Earth and primed it for life, it also broke off a large chunk that went on to become the Moon.   This story is known as

The official verdict is in. As the red supergiant Betelgeuse once again returns to normal brightness levels, astronomers have taken the star’s temperature to identify the cause of its recent dimming.   It turns out the star wasn’t fluctuating internally; rather, Betelgeuse sneezed out a huge cloud of dust, which obscured its light for a

According to a study published in the journal Frontiers in Plant Science, lettuce grown in space isn’t just delicious – it’s also just as nutritious and safe to eat as boring old Earth lettuce.   “The ability to grow safe, fresh food to supplement packaged foods of astronauts in space has been an important goal

When NASA’s Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport (Insight) lander set down on Mars in November of 2018, it began its two-year primary mission of studying Mars’ seismology and interior environment.   And now, just over a year and a half later, the results of the lander’s first twelve months on the

Time, as far as we know, moves only in one direction. But in 2018, researchers found events in some gamma-ray burst pulses that seemed to repeat themselves as though they were going backwards in time.   Now, recent research suggests a potential answer for what might be causing this time reversibility effect. If waves within

New analysis of organic molecules found in dried-up Martian mud in the Gale Crater has revealed an intriguing possibility. Scientists have concluded that we can’t rule out those molecules actually have a biological origin.   Although our understanding of the Martian molecules is limited and incomplete, the information we do have could be consistent with

NASA on Thursday announced the name of its next Mars rover: Perseverance. It will be the fifth exploratory vehicle on the Red Planet following in the tire tracks of the similarly augustly titled Sojourner, Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity.   The name was announced at an event at Lake Braddock Secondary School in Burke, Virginia, to