We humans like to put labels and boundaries on things. For example, the boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and space is the Kármán line, the point at 100 kilometres (62 miles) altitude where aeronautics end, and astronautics take over.   But Earth’s atmosphere is way more complicated than that (there’s even some debate about where the

Over the past few months, Elon Musk has been revealing new details about SpaceX’s upcoming launch system, called Starship. Musk has said the new launch vehicle, which he and engineers recently redesigned, will eventually replace all the company’s rockets. It will be fully reusable and extremely cheap to launch, the thinking goes – perhaps reducing

A new optical instrument that can detect plant-based organisms from kilometres away due to the unique way living things reflect light could one day help in the search for life beyond this planet, new research suggests.   The working prototype device – called the TreePol spectropolarimeter – is the result of years of research by

Neptune, it seems, has been keeping a few secrets. A teeny tiny moon has been found in orbit around the enigmatic outermost known planet – previously undetected, even though it’s right here in our Solar System.   It’s been named Hippocamp, after the half-fish, half-horse of Greek mythology (in keeping with Neptune’s sea theme), and

The Universe just got a little more crowded with the discovery of more than 300,000 potential galaxies in a tiny corner of the northern sky. A release of data gathered by the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) telescope network in Europe has added extraordinary new levels of detail to the map of radio waves across the

You’re not hallucinating: Yes, the Moon looks brighter than normal, and yes, it looks bigger too. But Tuesday evening will bring the real show: what astronomers at NASA call a “perigean” moon, or “supermoon”. The event will coincide with a full moon that’s often referred to as a “snow moon” or “hunger moon”.   It’s

If you live in the Southern Hemisphere, next time you get the opportunity, go outside and look at the night sky. Most of that celestial plain is covered in a star cluster that’s been torn apart by galactic tidal forces, and is now flowing past us as a giant river of over 4,000 stars.  

Sirius, a double-star system and the brightest object in the night sky, will briefly blink out of existence for parts of Earth on Monday evening. In an event called an occultation – when one object in space blocks the light of another behind it – a small asteroid known as (4388) Jürgenstock will slip in front of the

SpaceX, the aerospace company founded by Elon Musk, is working diligently on a wildly ambitious project: to permanently settle people on Mars. To help make that vision a reality, Musk’s company is developing a colossal, fully reusable launch system called Starship.   Starship is envisioned as a 180-foot-tall spaceship that will ride into orbit atop Super Heavy,

Long-duration spaceflight does weird things to the human body, even at the molecular level, but so far there’s no reason to think humans couldn’t survive a two-and-a-half-year round-trip journey to Mars.   That was the bottom-line message Friday from a NASA official and two scientists as they revealed more results from the agency’s “Twins Study,”

Our Sun can let out some solar flare rip-snorters from time to time, but it’s actually pretty quiet when compared to some other stars out there. Particularly, it seems, turbulent young stars. And astronomers have just caught one belching out a real corker.   It’s called JW 566, a young star about 389 parsecs (1,269

Astronomers have known for some time that the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxies will collide on some future date. The best guess for that rendezvous has been about 3.75 billion years from now.   But now a new study based on Data Release 2 from the ESA’s Gaia mission is bringing some clarity to

An invisible force is having an effect on our Universe. We can’t see it, and we can’t detect it – but we can observe how it interacts gravitationally with the things we can see and detect, such as light.   Now an international team of astronomers has used one of the world’s most powerful telescopes

A new study shows that Mars may very well be volcanically active. Nobody’s seen direct evidence of volcanism; no eruptions or magma or anything like that. Rather, the proof is in the water.   In the past, Mars was a much warmer and wetter place. Now, Mars is still home to lots of water, mostly

Rolling up to the crater’s edge, the Opportunity rover took in a landscape unlike anything any Earthling had ever seen. A vast, meteorite-blasted expanse of volcanic rock and iron oxide extended for 15 miles, ringed by rugged mountains under a dusky orange sky.   In months to come, the enterprising robot would uncover signs that

Earth is getting a special celestial visitor this week in the shape of comet C/2018 Y1 Iwamoto – this sparkling, green-hued hunk of ice and minerals is already visible in the night sky through telescopes and even binoculars.   It’s the first binocular comet of 2019 – which means a comet that’s visible from Earth

Universities in the US have long wrangled over who owns the world’s largest drum. Unsubstantiated claims to the title have included the “Purdue Big Bass Drum” and “Big Bertha“, which interestingly was named after the German World War I cannon and ended up becoming radioactive during the Manhattan Project.   Unfortunately for the Americans, however,

Remember Mars One, the startup that said it was going to fund a crewed mission to Mars by turning the journey into a reality television spectacle? Now the company is bankrupt, according to financial documents published online.   Engadget confirmed the bankruptcy with Mars One co-founder Bas Lansdorp, who told the publication that he was

The most distant object our species has ever visited, a space rock called 2014 MU69, is less snowman-shaped than scientists previously thought. NASA flew its New Horizons probe by the rock, which is nicknamed Ultima Thule and located 4 billion miles from Earth, on New Year’s Day.   New Horizons flew within 2,200 miles of

We’ve seen 3D printed rockets before, but never on this scale. UK space startup Orbex just showed off its Prime Rocket’s gigantic second stage — the “world’s largest 3D printed rocket engine,” according to a press release.   The entire rocket, including the engine, will stand at 56 feet (17 meters) tall — roughly a

We’ve been gazing out at the Solar System for a very long time, and by now we know, more or less, where things go. Sun, planets, asteroid belt, more planets, then millions more asteroids (we’re not really sure how many). Maybe another planet. OK, so it’s a little tricky.   But a new discovery has

There’s no two-ways about it, the Universe is an extremely big place! And thanks to the limitations placed upon us by Special Relativity, traveling to even the closest star systems could take millennia.   As we addressed in a previous article, the estimated travel time to the nearest star system (Alpha Centauri) could take anywhere

In 2021, Rosalind Franklin will set down on the rust-stained sands of Mars before setting off in hunt for chemical building blocks that could indicate the presence of life. The new name of the European Space Agency (ESA) ExoMars rover was selected to honour a British chemist who contributed to the discovery of DNA’s helical

Astronomers have been treated to a truly special look at some of the organic building blocks of the Universe, thanks to a newborn star that’s been spotted around 1,300 light-years away from Earth.   That star is V883 Ori – as it grows, the bursting heat is pushing back the star’s ‘snow line’ – that’s the area around

We’ve seen it before, but never this clearly. For the first time, China’s Longjiang-2 satellite photographed the entirety of the Moon’s far side and the Earth in a single shot, Popular Mechanics reports.   The 16 kilobyte image was downloaded by the Dutch Dwingeloo Radio Telescope over the course of about 20 minutes. We already

A month after China pulled off its historic Chang’e 4 mission, which landed robots on the moon’s far side for the first time, NASA has released an image further proving the feat was a success.   NASA photographed the Chinese landing site on January 30 with a moon-circling spacecraft called the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Researchers

On 30 October 2018 Kepler, NASA’s planet-hunting space telescope, sent its last signal. It had been on the ropes for years due to failing reaction wheels, but engineers had managed to keep it operational. Then, last year, it finally ran out of fuel.   Its mission had originally been planned for a duration 3.5 years.

For Elon Musk and SpaceX, the company he founded to reignite space exploration, a great deal hinges on the creation of the Starship. This super-heavy launch vehicle, which was has evolved considerably in the past few years, will eventually replace the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy as the mainstay of the SpaceX fleet. Once operational,

Russian news agency RIA Novosti revealed images last week of a hypersonic uncrewed spacecraft reportedly in development by the country’s space agency. The aircraft will be outfitted with a single Briz-M upper stage engine – a Russian space rocket that’s been in use since 2000 – and is designed to fly at altitudes of up to

Some of the most spectacular pictures of deep space are of nebulae – gorgeously coloured clouds of dust and gas glowing from within. They look peaceful and serene, but in actuality, they’re scenes of violence.   Usually, nebulae are either the lingering ghosts of exploded stars, or stellar nurseries – regions where stars are being

It sounds like something out of a sci-fi movie, but it’s a wild possibility scientists are actually exploring: how to fit a space station inside an asteroid. Why would we attempt such a bizarre feat of astro-engineering? Because the spin of the asteroid would create enough gravity for mining equipment to be effectively used, giving

Apparently our galaxy really likes to boogie. It has, on several occasions, enjoyed a Monster Mash; now it’s been caught doing the Twist. A new study has revealed that the Milky Way isn’t a nice, neat, flat disc – it’s seriously warped around the edges.   We often compare our home galaxy to our next-door

Since it was first detected hurling through our Solar System, the interstellar object known as ‘Oumuamua has been a source of immense scientific interest. Aside from being extrasolar in origin, the fact that it has managed to defy classification time and again has led to some pretty interesting theories. While some have suggested that it

Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission directorate, says it’s likely that there’s life beyond Earth. “Is there life beyond Earth? I think the answer is yes — but we just don’t know,” Zurbuchen said during an interview at Boston University. “The simple reason I think so is because we underestimated nature when we

Humanity is getting pretty good at looking deep into space. We’ve peered back over 13 billion light-years. We’ve seen – actually seen – two neutron stars colliding. We’re homing in on fast radio bursts, and we’re about to see, for the first time, the event horizon of a black hole. But there are still some

Record-smashing cold temperatures have led to a wave of headlines highlighting how parts of the US are now colder than Mars. In parts of media, this is now a near-yearly ritual: The Atlantic had a story on it in 2017, and even NASA’s Curiosity Rover tweeted it a few winters ago.   But what does

Curiosity has been puttering away out there on Mars since August 2012, but she still has a few surprises tucked inside her weathered chassis. Scientists have just figured out how to use the rover’s instruments to measure the gravity of the ground it’s been rolling across.   In turn, this has allowed scientists for the

When a black hole is actively feeding, something strange can be observed: enormously powerful jets of plasma shoot from its poles, at velocities approaching light speed. Given the intense gravitational interactions at play, exactly how those jets form is a mystery. But now, using computer simulations, a team of physicists has hit upon an answer

For the first time, astronomers have used supermassive black holes from just after the Big Bang to measure the expansion rate of the Universe. Now, we have a bigger mystery on our hands than the answer this effort provided.   It turns out the Universe is growing faster than expected. This could mean that the

For over 70 years, scientists have been predicting the existence of a certain kind of object in the outer Solar System. Small in size, these potential bodies are thought to constitute an important early step in the planet formation process.   Since these hypothetical objects are only between 1 and 10 kilometres in radius (0.6

Weeks after NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft made the farthest-ever visit to an object, located more than 4 billion miles from Earth, the probe beamed home an unprecedented photo.   The image (below) is devoid of colour and looks somewhat fuzzy, but it represents the most detailed look yet at the object. Researchers say there are

A few years ago, the Hubble Space Telescope did something amazing: over the course of 841 orbits and hundreds of exposures, it imaged a tiny region of space in the constellation of Fornax, peeling back the layers of time by 13 billion years, to just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.  

Earth’s oldest known rock may have been found, in the last place anyone would have thought to look for it: in samples of rock from the Moon, brought back home to Earth by Apollo 14 astronauts in 1971.   We’re not talking about a “Moon was once part of Earth” rock (that’s just one hypothesis

President Donald Trump once offered NASA “all the money you could ever need” to land on Mars during the first term of his presidency, according to a New York magazine report citing a coming memoir from a former White House communications official.   According to the magazine, in Team of Vipers: My 500 Extraordinary Days

The ingredients that created the conditions for life on Earth might not be native to our home planet. According to a new hypothesis, the essential elements for life were carried in on a Mars-sized planet that collided with Earth 4.5 billion years ago.   This hypothetical planet is called Theia, and it’s also believed, by

A ‘super blood Moon’ eclipse might sound cool enough, but the total lunar eclipse of January 2019 has now gone down in history. For the first time, astronomers and eclipse-watchers around the globe caught sight of a piece of space debris – most likely a meteoroid – slamming into the surface of the Moon as it passed

Stainless steel won’t just make the SpaceX Starship rocket look cool – it’ll help it stay cool, too. On Tuesday, Popular Mechanics published an interview with CEO Elon Musk focused on SpaceX’s decision to build its massive new rocket out of stainless steel instead of the previously planned carbon fiber.   Not only is the

The year 2019 is here. With it, we’ve been promised a splendid moment in astronomy. For years, the Event Horizon Telescope has been working to bring us the first ever telescopic photograph of the event horizon of a black hole.   Indeed, for all their popularity in public imagination, we have never actually seen a