Astronomers have just finished using an X-ray telescope to peer into galactic haloes, only to find Universe’s missing matter isn’t hiding there, either. But it’s gotta be out there somewhere…   The Universe is made up of loads of matter. There’s normal, or baryonic, matter – that’s the stuff we can detect. Space dust and

NASA’s newest satellite is scheduled to launch on the evening of Wednesday 18 April, 22:51 UTC. Known as TESS, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite will play a crucial role in humanity’s search for planets outside our own Solar System. And it’ll be blasted into orbit by SpaceX’s famous, reusable Falcon 9 rocket.   Shortly after the launch, SpaceX

There’s something sorely lacking in the scientific fields of astronomy and astrophysics. As it turns out, we’re still lacking logical consistency in how we measure what goes on in space.   Writing for the journal Astronomy & Geophysics, retired physics professor Keith Atkin of the University of Sheffield says that our current global “system” – if

The hypothetical cosmic portals linking two points of space-time that we call wormholes are the stuff of science fiction and space theory right now – but if they really do exist, one scientist has come up with a way we might spot them: by the shadows they leave.   It’s similar to the way that

Scientists have discovered that tiny diamonds found inside a meteorite show signs of originating in a lost planet – one that dates back to the earliest days of the Solar System.   This amazing finding could help us figure out one of the most enduring questions of astronomy, that of the formation of planets. According

While the world was busy doing its thing on Saturday, a giant asteroid the size of a football field whizzed by our planet. NASA scientists noticed the massive asteroid at an observatory in Arizona just a few hours before it gave Earth a surprise flyby.    A mere 21 hours after that initial sighting, Asteroid

The dazzling Lyrid meteor shower is starting this week. The annual shower, which happens between April 16 and 25 each year, occurs when the Earth passes through the tail of a comet.   While meteor showers are difficult to accurately predict, you’ll probably get your best glimpse of it in the early morning hours of

NASA’s latest planet hunting satellite TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) was scheduled to be launched into space by SpaceX this evening at 22:32 UTC, Monday 16 April.   But the team has just announced that the launch has been scrubbed. They’re now working towards a launch window the evening of Wednesday, 18 April. “Standing down

NASA’s newest satellite is on scheduled to launch on the evening of Monday 16 April, 22:32 UTC. Known as TESS, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite will play a crucial role in humanity’s search for planets outside our own Solar System. And it’ll be blasted into orbit by SpaceX’s famous, reusable Falcon 9 rocket.   Shortly after the

Elon Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, is raising about US$500 million in new funding. The cash investment would be a boon to SpaceX, which is chasing three incredibly ambitious projects in the coming decade, including a global satellite-internet network, a spaceship to explore and colonize Mars, and the world’s fastest transportation system.   SpaceX confirmed that

Previous generations have looked up at the stars in the night sky and wondered whether they are also orbited by planets. Our generation is the first to find out the answer. We now know that nearly all stars have planets around them, and as our technology improves we keep finding more. NASA’s newest satellite, TESS

Black holes could be making cataclysmic collisions across the Universe every few minutes. Unfortunately, the aftermath is too faint to alert our current detection technology. But a clever new technique could allow us to “hear” these collisions by finding their signals in the background static that LIGO-Virgo’s detectors are picking up all the time.  

NASA’s Juno probe continues to whip around Jupiter and beam back incredible new colour photos of the giant planet. But images that capture the planet’s stormy poles in infrared light, which is invisible to human eyes, are helping to crack the mysteries of Jupiter’s inner workings.   NASA released a new 3D animation on Wednesday

The Sun is getting up to shenanigans again, and once again Earth is going to be feeling the effects. Coronal holes have opened up on the solar surface, sending geomagnetic storms in our direction.   Holes on the Sun might sounds a bit scary, but they’re very common, particularly during the solar minimum. This is

Something strange and wonderful might be happening out in the border regions of galaxies: pairs of black holes merging again and again to produce phenomenal amounts of energy, more than a single star could possibly generate on its own.   That’s the thinking of scientists studying dense clusters of stars – pockets of space where

Since it’s discovery was announced in August of 2016, Proxima b has been an endless source of wonder and the target of many scientific studies. In addition to being the closest extra-solar planet to our Solar System, this terrestrial planet also orbits within Proxima Centauri’s circumstellar habitable zone (aka. “Goldilocks Zone”).   As a result,

Every so often, neutron stars do something really, really weird. The rate of their rotation abruptly changes. This is called glitching, and we don’t know what causes it – but now astronomers have observed it for the first time using a radio telescope.   The neutron star is called the Vela Pulsar, about 1,000 light-years

Once every 53.5 days, NASA‘s Juno probe screams over Jupiter‘s cloud tops roughly 75 times as fast as a bullet. The spacecraft has used these high-speed flybys, called perijoves, to document the gas giant like never before since August 2016. It records the planet with radar systems, radiation detectors, magnetic and gravitational field recorders, and

It’s always disheartening when the science news corner of the internet gets overwhelmed by something that’s not even remotely science. Over the weekend, the UK tabloid The Daily Star published an “exclusive” claiming that four astronauts – including Buzz Aldrin – allegedly passed lie detector tests while talking about their claims of encountering aliens.  

We’re never short of reasons to look up at the night sky – whether it’s the rare second blue moon we were just treated to, or a meteor shower. But in case you need a little motivation to get out of the house and into the fresh air this month, we have a beautiful one

NASA has a lot of experience when it comes to developing supersonic aircraft. In fact, testing supersonic craft was how NASA got its start, back when it still known as the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA).   Beginning with the Bell X-1, the tradition of using X-planes and other experimental aircraft continues, and has progressed

Looking for a getaway that offers unmatched views of sunrises and sunsets? Specifically, 384 of them in 12 days? Try outer space. Houston-based Orion Span hopes to launch the “first luxury hotel in space” – the 35-by-14-foot Aurora Station – by late 2021 and bring guests on board the following year.   The hotel will

Looking for a getaway that offers unmatched views of sunrises and sunsets? Specifically, 384 of them in 12 days? Try outer space. Houston-based Orion Span hopes to launch the “first luxury hotel in space” – the 35-by-14-foot Aurora Station – by late 2021 and bring guests on board the following year.   The hotel will

For the first time, astronomers have found something we have never seen outside the Milky Way – a low magnetic field neutron star without a binary pair. And it’s surrounded by a truly unusual ring of cool gas.   The supernova remnant SNR 1E 0102.2–7219 (or E0102 for short) is about 2,000 years old, located

Scientists have discovered that the massive bursts of solar activity we call ‘solar tornadoes’ are not at all like the twisters we get here on Earth – even though they sure appeared similar on a gigantic scale.    The term describes the enormous eruptions of gas that appear to swirl up from the Sun’s surface,

One of the chemical elements essential to life is phosphorus, but the latest research suggests there may be less of it in the wider Universe than we thought. That could be bad news for those hoping to find alien life out there in space.   Scientists think that life-giving phosphorus – capable of triggering the

In 2017, NASA space probes detected a massive, human-made ‘barrier’ surrounding Earth. And tests have confirmed that it’s actually having an effect on space weather far beyond our planet’s atmosphere.   That means we’re not just changing Earth so severely, scientists are calling for a whole new geological epoch to be named after us –

Three years ago, a galaxy 1.3 billion light-years away gave astronomers a special clue on dark matter, indicating this mysterious stuff can interact with forces other than gravity. Now a new study has contradicted this finding, sending scientists back to the drawing board.   Dark matter is referred to as dark because the only sign

Our universe may end the same way it was created: with a big, sudden bang. That’s according to new research from a group of Harvard physicists, who found that the destabilization of the Higgs boson – a tiny quantum particle that gives other particles mass – could lead to an explosion of energy that would

There isn’t just one black hole at the heart of the Milky Way. Scientists have found a dozen clustered around its supermassive core, Sagittarius A* – and their results imply that there might be up to 20,000 black holes crowding up the inner region of our galaxy.   The research is based on a decades-old

A new examination of a vast wave of cool gas rippling through a distant galaxy cluster has revealed a surprise about its shape, changing what we understand about cosmic weather.   This “cold front” is estimated to be roughly 5 billion years old, so was expected to be a little hazy at the edges by

Before humans can set foot on the surface of Mars, robots like the Curiosity Rover have been doing an exhaustive reconnaissance job for us. But now NASA has a new idea for sending over more mechanical explorers – and it’s weird, slightly terrifying, and amazing all at once.   We’re talking swarms of robot bees. On

Astronomers have detected 72 incredibly bright and quick events flashing across a recent sky survey – and they’re struggling to understand where they came from. The mysterious explosions are similar in brightness to supernovae – the final, gigantic explosions that extinguish stars.   But supernovae can be seen lighting up the sky for several months

Hubble has obtained an absolutely amazing photograph – a blue giant star called Icarus 9 billion light-years from our Solar System, the farthest individual star ever seen. And it’s all thanks to a rare alignment of cosmic objects called gravitational lensing.   Previously, Hubble has imaged some impressively distant galaxies. In April 2016, it snapped

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 singularities of space-time

The most remote location on Earth has many names: It’s called Point Nemo (Latin for ‘no one’) and the Oceanic Pole of Inaccessibility. Most precisely, its exact coordinates are 48 degrees 52.6 minutes south latitude and 123 degrees 23.6 minutes west longitude.   The spot is about 2,250 km (1,400 miles) from any spot of

The Chinese space station called Tiangong-1 is expected to crash to Earth within hours. The 9.4-ton spacecraft went up into space in 2011, but in 2016, the Chinese government lost communication with it due to an apparent technical malfunction.   It’s been difficult to predict the precise moment when Tiangong-1 will re-enter Earth’s atmosphere, and where it will break up into

On March 31, much of the world will get to see a rare event: A second blue moon in one year. It will be the second blue moon of 2018 – at least, according to one definition of the term. And our last until 2020.   Despite the name, as many of us have learned

The bus-sized Chinese space station Tiangong-1, known as “Heavenly Palace,” is whipping around our planet in the final hours before it burns into Earth’s atmosphere. In the very near future, it will break up, with some of its debris likely falling to Earth.   In these final hours, Maximilian Teodorescu, a scientific researcher with the

Newly obtained audio of a bizarre UFO incident that occurred in the skies above Arizona last month has been released online, providing first-hand evidence of a strange aerial encounter that nobody at the FAA has been able to explain.   The incident, which took place on the afternoon of February 24 in the airspace over

Dark matter is confusing at the best of times. But now astronomers have made an extraordinary and perplexing discovery – the first ever observation of a galaxy with almost no dark matter at all.   We still don’t know what exactly dark matter is, but it’s currently the most elegant explanation for some of the

Once it deploys, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will be the most powerful and technically complex space telescope ever deployed. Using its powerful suite of infrared-optimized instruments, this telescope will be able to study the earliest stars and galaxies in the Universe, extra-solar planets around nearby stars, and the planets, moons and asteroids of

When Tiangong-1 rocketed into the sky in 2011, optimists hoped the space station – literal translation: “heavenly palace” – would be a model for a permanent fixture among the stars, a space laboratory that was among humankind’s first footsteps in the Cosmos.   So, when an out-of-control Tiangong-1 comes plummeting to earth in a superheated

By applying methods used to evaluate the chances of life on other planets, scientists have concluded that Earth is indeed inhabitable – but it’s also becoming increasingly polluted by levels of carbon dioxide and methane.   The inspiration for the new research is an experiment run by Carl Sagan and his team back in the

Once again, a distant star know for its bizarre, unexplained light fluctuations has kicked into action, this time dipping in brightness more dramatically than ever. KIC 8462852, also known as Tabby’s Star or ‘alien megastructure’ star as we like to call it, has dimmed by at least 5 percent – maybe even as much as 10

To glimpse a meteor shower, sometimes you’ve got to wake up in the middle of the night, bundle up against frigid cold, and wait many minutes or hours. All to see a streak of light, a piece of space that crosses briefly into our world.   Soon, though, all you may need is enough cash.

When a star goes supernova, it’s such a gargantuan process that it usually lasts for months. So when astronomers caught one lasting just a few weeks, they sat up and paid attention – and found a totally new type of supernova never observed before.   The supernova is called KSN 2015K, and it peaked in

On 19 October 2017, the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System-1 (Pan-STARRS-1) telescope in Hawaii announced the first-ever detection of an interstellar asteroid – I/2017 U1 (aka. ‘Oumuamua).   Since that time, no effort has been spared to study this object before it leaves our Solar System. These include listening to it for signs