The last full moon of the decade will occur tonight, at 12:12 am Eastern time on December 12. It’s called the full “cold moon”. The Moon will appear full all night, first becoming visible in the east with a saffron-colored tinge as it climbs just above the horizon. The Moon rises at 4:35 pm in

Like many other spiral galaxies in the Universe, the Milky Way Galaxy consists of two disk-like structures – the thin disk and the thick disk. The thick disk, which envelopes the thin disk, contains about 20 percent of the Milky Way’s stars and is thought to be the older of the pair based on the

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft arrived at asteroid Bennu in December 2018, and just one week later, it discovered something unusual about Bennu: the asteroid was ejecting particles into space.   The spacecraft’s navigation camera first spotted the particles, but scientists initially thought they were just stars in the background. After closer scrutiny, the OSIRIS-REx team realized

NASA has completed the giant rocket that will take US astronauts back to the Moon, the space agency’s head announced Monday, pledging the mission would take place in 2024 despite being beset by delays.   Towering 212 feet (65 meters), the equivalent of a 20-story building, The Space Launch System (SLS) is the tallest rocket

Wherever we humans go, we leave behind a mess. That goes for space, too. Today, our species is responsible for more than 500,000 pieces of junk hurtling around Earth at phenomenal speeds, and if we don’t start actively removing the largest pieces, the risk of collisions will only grow worse.   “Imagine how dangerous sailing

Plate tectonics have played a vital role in the geological evolution of our planet. In addition, many scientists believe that Earth’s geologically activity may have played an important role in the evolution of life – and could even be essential for a planet’s habitability.   For this reason, scientists have long sought to determine how

SpaceX launched a 3-ton shipment to the International Space Station on Thursday, including “mighty mice” for a muscle study, a robot sensitive to astronauts’ emotions and a miniature version of a brewery’s malt house.   The Dragon capsule also is delivering holiday goodies for the six station residents. NASA’s Kenny Todd isn’t giving any hints,

NASA’s exoplanet-hunting satellite TESS caught a rare glimpse of the entirety of a “comet outburst”, which is an epic cosmic event in which a comet spontaneously combusts in a brilliant explosion.   The satellite captured a time-lapse video of the event, according to a NASA release. The footage is grainy, but it’s an awe-inspiring glimpse

How bright is the Moon? Given its relatively close proximity to Earth, and the fact that we’re looking at it all the time, you’d think that would be an easy question to answer. Turns out you’d be wrong.    We’re usually looking at the Moon from Earth, through the atmosphere. That creates just enough interference that

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe made the closest ever flyby of the Sun in August 2018, collecting massive amounts of data using cutting-edge scientific instruments from a distance of 15 million miles – a mission that also, incidentally, set the record for the fastest-ever human-made object of all time.   Now, scientists are starting to release

Sometimes, if you look deep into the soft glow of a dying sun, you might see the rocky remains of small planets slowly being digested. For the first time, astronomers have watched a collapsed star pull apart the remains of something a little more hearty.   An analysis of the spectral fingerprints of the white

There are a number of health risks that come with going to space. Aside from the increased exposure to solar radiation and cosmic rays, there are the notable effects that microgravity can have on human physiology.   As Scott Kelly can attest, these go beyond muscle and bone degeneration and include diminished organ function, eyesight,

NASA announced Monday that it had finally found the crash site of India’s lost lunar lander, Vikram. Images taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera show the lander’s crash site about 600 km (372 miles) from the Moon’s south pole, shown below, including an impact point and field of debris surrounding it. The impact point.

How typical is our Solar System? The question bedevils planetary scientists, but making detections of analogous features in other planetary systems is pretty hard. Yet astronomers have just made one – of a Kuiper belt-like feature around a star 320 light-years away.   It is, they say, the first polarimetric detection of the inner ring

Fireballs explode in Earth’s atmosphere all the time, usually unremarkably. And a fireball that exploded over the Australian desert in 2016 might have been mistaken for any other bolide, if not for a network of cameras monitoring the sky to search for just such events.   It was thanks to images taken by these cameras

The Chang’e-4 mission, the fourth installment in the Chinese Lunar Exploration Program, has made some significant achievements since it launched in December of 2018. In January of 2019, the mission lander and its Yutu 2 (Jade Rabbit 2) rover became the first robotic explorers to achieve a soft landing on the far side of the Moon.

Black holes are vast, matter-annihilating objects that seem to defy physics by their very existence. They’re so weird, that when Albert Einstein’s equations first predicted the existence of these beasts, he didn’t believe they could actually be real.   And you can’t really blame him, because the idea that we have these matter-sucking singularities of space-time scattered

When a huge dust storm on Mars—like the one in 2018—reaches its full power, it can turn into a globe-bestriding colossus. This happens regularly on Mars, and these storms usually start out as a series of smaller, runaway storms. NASA scientists say that these storms can spawn massive towers of Martian dust that reach 80

After observing a part of the sky near the Southern Constellation of Ara for about two months using MeerKAT, a radio telescope based in the Karoo desert in South Africa, our team of scientists noticed something strange. The radio emission of an object brightened by a factor of three over roughly three weeks.   Intrigued,

A team of scientists working with the Murchison Widefield Array (WMA) radio telescope are trying to find the signal from the Universe’s first stars. Those first stars formed after the Universe’s Dark Ages.   To find their first light, the researchers are looking for the signal from neutral hydrogen, the gas that dominated the Universe

Most models of the Solar System aren’t completely accurate, and there’s a good reason for that. It’s not laziness or scientific misunderstanding – an accurate, to-scale portrayal of the Solar System just wouldn’t look that interesting. You have to zoom in to see what’s going on.   James O’Donoghue, a planetary scientist at the Japanese

A new black hole search method has just yielded fruit, and boy is it juicy. Astronomers have found a stellar-mass black hole clocking in at around 70 times the mass of the Sun – but according to current models of stellar evolution, its size is impossible, at least in the Milky Way.   The chemical

We spotted it in August: a mysterious object shooting through our Solar System on a strange, hyperbolic trajectory implying that, whatever this thing was, it wasn’t from around here.   Subsequent analysis confirmed this visitor from deep space, now designated 2I/Borisov, was only the second interstellar object ever detected in our Solar System (and the

Starlink has had its fair share of critics in the last few months. The ambitious SpaceX project to launch up to 42,000 satellites and provide worldwide internet access has the International Astronomical Union, scientists, and stargazers nervous about the implications of such a huge number of satellites in our orbit.   The recent Monocerotid meteor

In the immediate vicinity of a supermassive black hole‘s event horizon, conditions are pretty wild. But travel a little farther out, and other objects can be snared in its gravitational influence – like the stars orbiting the supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy, Sagittarius A*.   According to a new paper, it’s

Despite what you might have heard, Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is probably not on the point of total disintegration. The most powerful storm in our Solar System has been shrinking for at least a hundred years, computational physicist Philip Marcus says, but that doesn’t mean it’s actually dying.   “I don’t think its fortunes were

If you venture too close to one of Earth’s poles, you’ll notice something rather strange happening to any gadgets using radio waves, satellite connections, or GPS. Now, NASA is on a mission to find out why.   Well, three missions to be exact. NASA is backing a range of initiatives to investigate the northern polar

On Saturday, China’s space agency launched a Long March 3B rocket from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center. The mission was a success in that it resulted in the delivery of two satellites into orbit.   But when the rocket’s first stage booster returned to Earth, it landed on a populated area, Ars Technica reported, destroying

Of the myriad galaxies we’ve seen in the night sky, NGC 6240 has always stood out for its peculiar shape and unusual infrared brightness. It was thought to be the result of two galaxies colliding – until now.   All the way back in 1983, astronomers reported evidence of a double active nucleus – two

Not all rovers are designed to roam around on the surface of other worlds like Mars. One rover, at least, is aquatic; a necessary development if we’re going to explore Enceladus, Europa, and the Solar System’s other watery worlds.   This rover is called the Buoyant Rover for Under-Ice Exploration, or BRUIE. This is not

SpaceX’s Starship Mark 1 prototype rocket partially exploded during a pressure test in Boca Chica, Texas. The incident happened Wednesday afternoon and was captured on a livestream. During the test, the upper portion of the rocket blew apart and heavy plumes of smoke flowed from the vehicle.   “The purpose of today’s test was to

Scientists are predicting a rare meteor outburst this week that may be brief but incredibly intense. A brilliant flurry in the sky near the Unicorn constellation is expected Thursday night over the eastern half of North America and all South America.   The action should unfold early Friday morning over the western portions of Europe

The most in-depth radio survey ever taken of the southern sky has helped astronomers find the remnants of dead massive stars nobody knew were there. It’s also produced some gorgeous images in the process.   It’s called GaLactic and Extragalactic All-sky MWA (GLEAM), an all-sky survey with the same resolution as the human eye –

Two violent explosions in galaxies billions of light-years away recently produced the brightest light in the Universe. Scientists caught it in action for the first time. The explosions were gamma-ray bursts: short eruptions of the most energetic form of light in the Universe.   Telescopes caught the first burst in July 2018. The second burst,

The search for evidence of microbial life on Mars – whether fossil or extant – is ramping up, and it’s even being included in the mission statements of future Mars missions. According to one scientist, though, we may have already found life on Mars, and it’s not titchy microbes, but strapping great bugs.   Entomologist

For the modern astronomer, satellites are just a part of life. There are more than 2,000 active ones currently orbiting Earth, and the smartest minds in space photography have managed to work out clever ways of removing the occasional fly over from their images of space.   But then there’s Starlink. The first stages of

A team of scientists says it’s found sugar molecules – crucial to the development of life on Earth – in two different fallen meteorites. The discovery suggests that meteor impacts may have delivered the sugars to Earth, per a NASA press release.   One of the sugars is the RNA component ribose, a key biological

In space, no one can hear you scream because sound can’t travel in a vacuum. But if we convert electromagnetic activity to sound, it suddenly becomes a very noisy place. And our Earth is no exception; specifically, in and around the magnetic field generated by Earth’s molten core.   This barrier, called a magnetosphere, is

It may have only been officially discovered in August 2019, but the tremendously exciting interstellar comet 2I/Borisov was already well inside the Solar System at that point. And, after poring over sky survey data, astronomers have found the object appeared in images dating all the way back to December 2018.   The comet’s distance at

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Scientists on Monday unveiled the first global geological map of Saturn’s moon Titan including vast plains and dunes of frozen organic material and lakes of liquid methane, illuminating an exotic world considered a strong candidate in the search for life beyond Earth.   The map was based on radar, infrared and other

A team led by researchers out of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, has confirmed traces of water vapor above the surface of Jupiter’s icy moon Europa. And that’s a big deal as the tiny space rock is one of the highest priority targets in NASA’s search for extraterrestrial life, according to the

You can’t tell from Earth, but the Sun’s outer atmosphere is hundreds of times hotter than its surface – it’s a long-standing mystery that astrophysicists have been working on for years, and now we might just have an answer.   Scientists have previously suggested that solar plasma jets called spicules shooting up from the interior were

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

Back in November 2018, NASA announced that the Mars 2020 rover would land in the Jezero Crater. Jezero Crater is a geologically diverse area, with an alluvial fan of sediment deposited by an incoming river. That sediment may contain preserved ancient organic molecules, and the deposit is clearly visible in satellite images of the Crater.

There seems to be something large lurking in the far reaches of the Solar System, messing with the orbits of some of the Kuper Belt rocks out past Neptune. Some astronomers believe it’s a planet, about five times the mass of Earth. They call it Planet Nine.   But finding this potential lurker is not

Japan’s Hayabusa-2 probe will leave its orbit around a distant asteroid and head for Earth on Wednesday after an unprecedented mission, carrying samples that could shed light on the origins of the Solar System.   The long voyage home would begin at 10:05 am (0105 GMT), with the probe expected to drop off its precious

We’re still learning about the potential effect that extended periods spent in space could have on the human body. Now a new health threat has been identified, one which could put lives at risk on long journeys through the cosmos.   The problem lies in the internal jugular vein (IJV), a major blood vessel running down

Atmospheric gases on Mars sure provide us with plenty of mystery. First, there was that business with the disappearing, reappearing methane. Now, oxygen levels have been observed rising and falling over the Gale Crater, by amounts that just don’t fit any known chemical processes.   The data comes from Curiosity, the Mars rover that’s been making