Chris Hadfield, most widely known for his zero-gravity guitar-playing, has seen an impressive amount of space travel. Between his first spaceflight in 1995, his second in 2001, and a third in 2013, Hadfield has flown inside NASA space shuttles, a Russian Soyuz spacecraft, and the International Space Station.   Hadfield, who’s now retired, shares his

A mysteriously fluctuating bulge observed in the atmosphere of Venus now has a more concrete explanation. According to a newly published study, the planet’s enormous mountain ranges are to blame for a massive gravity wave.   Venus is often called Earth’s sister planet because of the similarities between the two. If it’s a twin, though,

Mars will look brighter in the night sky over the next six weeks than it has appeared in 15 years. That’s because the red planet will be at its closest point to Earth since 2003 throughout June and July, as our planet passes between Mars and the Sun.   On July 31, when Mars will

In 2006, NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) established orbit around the Red Planet. Using an advanced suite of scientific instruments – which include cameras, spectrometers, and radar – this spacecraft has been analyzing landforms, geology, minerals and ice on Mars for years and assisting with other missions.   While the mission was only meant to

A lunar meteorite, discovered in the desert of northwest Africa, holds strong evidence that there is an abundant supply of water on the Moon – maybe even enough for a future colony.   Examining the meteorite, scientists from Tohoku University have determined that the other-worldly rock is made up of moganite, a mineral that requires

As a Chinese microsatellite called Longjiang-2 slipped into orbit around the moon last month, the spacecraft looked back at Earth and snapped its first test photos. One of those images shows our blue-marble planet hanging in the void of space beyond the Moon.   The images were taken on May 28 using an on-board camera

When a black hole tears apart a star, not all of it ends up sucked into oblivion. Some of the material gets to be blasted out in a spectacular jet – and now, for the first time, we have direct images of one of those jets forming and expanding.   The event took place in

When it comes to the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence (SETI) in the Universe, there is the complicated matter of what to be on the lookout for. Beyond the age-old question of whether or not intelligent life exists elsewhere in the Universe (statistically speaking, it is very likely that it does), there’s also the question of

Mars is not a friendly place to be right now, especially if you’re an aging solar-powered rover. NASA says a global dust storm is forming. The storm is now about 10 billion acres in size, which is enough to cover North America and Russia, or more than one-quarter of Mars. Some regions of the Martian

In 1935, Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen hypothesised the existence of wormholes – a sort of “bridge” connecting two regions of space, due to extreme gravitational warping of spacetime.   The concept is theoretical, and wormholes are yet to be detected. But according to a new paper, those gravitational waves we’ve detected from colliding black

Mars is currently being blasted with a dust storm the likes of which we’ve rarely seen. And at 1:30 pm EDT (5:30 pm UTC) this Wednesday, NASA will let us know just how this weather event will affect their ongoing operations.   A week ago the storm was 18 million square kilometres (7 million square

It was a Saturday, and Laura Murray was a 10-year-old girl hanging out with her nanny outside her family’s Cincinnati townhouse. Her mother, giddy with excitement, handed the little girl a small glass vial filled with light-gray dust.   It was from the Moon, her mother told her. Along with it was a handwritten note:

Particles collected from Earth’s upper atmosphere, originally deposited by comets, are older than our Solar System, scientists say – and these fine bits of interstellar dust could teach us about how planets and stars form from the very beginning.   These cosmic particles have lived through at least 4.6 billion years and travelled across incredible

The source of a mysterious microwave glow detected across our galaxy eluded astronomers for decades. But now a crack team has finally pinpointed the source: nanoscopic particles of crystalline carbon, otherwise known as diamond dust.   There are several environments across the Milky Way that produce a faint glow known as anomalous microwave emission (AME).

NASA has suspended science operations on its brave little Mars rover, Opportunity, as a huge dust storm rages over its location in the planet’s Perseverance Valley. First detected by NASA on June 1, the storm has worsened over the weekend, the intense dust darkening the sky over Mars and leaving Opportunity in the dark.  

In an exciting first, Indian scientists have discovered a sub-Saturn exoplanet orbiting a Sun-like star around 600 light-years away. The planet has been named EPIC 211945201b or K2-236b and it’s big – around 27 times more massive than Earth. The find sees India join a small group of countries to have confirmed a planet outside our

During the 1970s, astronomer became aware of a massive radio source at the center of our galaxy that they later realized was a Supermassive Black Hole (SMBH) – which has since been named Sagittarius A*.   And in a recent survey conducted by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, astronomers discovered evidence for hundreds or even thousands of black holes located

Between 1971 and 1977, Apollo scientists conducting experiments on the Moon discovered that the surface of our li’l satellite buddy got mysteriously warmer. But the data from 1974 onwards went missing, and the strange warming phenomenon remained an enigma.   Now a team of researchers from Texas Tech University has found and restored that data

The search is heating up for a planet beyond Pluto – not just over the evidence, but also over the hypothetical world’s name. No one knows for sure if there really is a missing planet out there, since astronomers have yet to identify it in telescope images. However, they keep turning up indirect evidence that

For years, NASA’s Curiosity rover has patiently gathered samples on the surface of Mars. Today, scientists are announcing they’ve discovered conclusive evidence that several organic compounds are indeed found on the Red Planet.   On top of that, after keeping close tabs on methane levels in the Martian atmosphere, scientists have finally confirmed something weird

NASA’s New Horizons probe – the same one that gave us stunning photos of Pluto – has just woken up, approximately 6 billion kilometres (3.7 billion miles) from home. It’s currently flying through the Kuiper Belt, and off on an exciting mission scheduled for New Year’s Day – the first-ever flyby of the Kuiper Belt

Lightning on Jupiter has always been something of a mystery. But thanks to the latest efforts of the Juno probe, we now know that it is actually far more similar to lightning on Earth than we had thought – but it’s also still pretty weird, too.   Data from everyone’s favourite Jupiter probe has revealed

In the far reaches of the Solar System, objects go into some weird orbits, and astronomers have been baffled as to why. The most intriguing possibility has been that of a huge, unseen planet lurking out there way beyond Neptune. But now a new explanation has emerged, putting a massive dent in the idea of this

At 2 pm EDT (6 pm UTC) this Thursday, NASA will have a big Mars announcement to make. As with most announcements of announcements, they’ve only released a few details, but we do know that the “live discussion” will talk about “new science results from NASA’s Mars Curiosity rover”.   So what has Curiosity found?

For the past two years, NASA’s Juno probe has studied planet Jupiter like no spacecraft before it. The US$1 billion mission has peeled back the giant planet’s thick cloud layers, searched for an elusive core, and returned dazzling images of colossal storms and chaotic cloud bands.   But all good things must come to an

Time seems to move faster as we age, but it turns out that maybe the opposite is true: our days on Earth are getting longer over time, and it’s all thanks to the Moon’s effect on our planet’s rotation.   But don’t go planning your extra sleep-ins just yet. A new study has traced the

Witnesses reported a fireball streaking across the sky above Botswana on Saturday night. The asteroid hurtling toward Earth at 10 miles (16 km) a second looked like it could be the harbinger of catastrophe. A webcam in a rural area west of Johannesburg captured it, showing a luminous orb igniting the sky in a bright

The incredible gravitational wave event that gave us colliding neutron stars and pictures of colliding neutron stars is the astronomical gift that just keeps on giving. And it looks like it’s given us yet another new thing to study – the lowest-mass black hole ever found.   Gravitational waves from high-mass mergers start before the

When it comes to the new era of space exploration, one of the primary focuses has been on cutting costs. By reducing the costs associated with individual launches, space agencies and private aerospace companies will not only be able to commercialise Low Earth-Orbit (LEO), but also mount far more in the way of exploration missions

The world has fallen in love with the spectacular images of Jupiter NASA delivers every few month. But few people know that to obtain these photos is a long, complicated, and even dangerous process.   To take them, the shoe-box sized camera on NASA’s Juno probe has survived years of the cold wasteland of space,

We haven’t found any evidence of life on the 3,730 confirmed exoplanets identified to date. Maybe we’ve just been looking in the wrong place? Astronomers have come up with new cosmic places that could support live, identifying 121 gas giants that may be orbited by habitable moons.   It’s not such a weird idea (although

At the center of our galaxy resides a Supermassive Black Hole (SMBH) known as Sagittarius A. Based on ongoing observations, astronomers have determined that this SMBH measures 44 million km (27.34 million miles) in diameter and has an estimated mass of 4.31 million Solar Masses.   On occasion, a star will wander too close to

By Earth’s standards, you could hardly imagine a stranger world than frigid, tiny Pluto. It resides in the far corner of the Solar System at an average of about 4 billion miles from the sun.   NASA’s New Horizons probe, which flew within 7,800 miles (12,500 km) of the dwarf planet in July 2015, gave

Last year, ‘declassified’ videos of numerous UFO encounters and reports of a top secret Pentagon program to investigate them made headlines around the world. Now, fresh details about the bizarre backstory to one of these unexplained incidents have emerged, courtesy of a recently leaked confidential military report that describes “several occasions” where the US Navy

Off the coast of Hawaii, nearly a kilometre beneath the waves, an active volcano bubbles, spewing heat from beneath the seabed. This is the Lō’ihi Seamount, and NASA is studying it in the hopes of learning more about extraterrestrial life.   Saturn has two moons that are currently being eyeballed as the strongest candidates for

Dark matter, or at least a portion of it, could be carrying an incredibly weak electrical force – equal to about a millionth of an electron’s charge. That’s according to data from the Experiment to Detect the Global Epoch of Reionisation Signature (EDGES).   Though controversial, the potential for even the tiniest interactions between this mysterious form

The Universe is big, and strange, and there’s a lot of stuff out there that works in mysterious ways. Astronomers spend their time trying to understand these workings so they can figure out the Big Questions: Who we are. If we’re alone. Where the Universe came from. Where it’s going.   One of our favourite

As an astrophysicist, I am always struck by the fact that even the wildest science-fiction stories tend to be distinctly human in character. No matter how exotic the locale or how unusual the scientific concepts, most science fiction ends up being about quintessentially human (or human-like) interactions, problems, foibles and challenges.   This is what

The Universe is so unimaginably big, and it’s positively teeming with an almost infinite supply of potentially life-giving worlds. So where the heck is everybody? At its heart, this is what’s called the Fermi Paradox: the perplexing scientific anomaly that despite there being billions of stars in our Milky Way galaxy – let alone outside

Scientists say they have determined the most likely place to find traces of ancient microbial life on Mars in future missions to the Red Planet. In a new ‘field guide’ for discovering fossils on Mars, researchers say iron-rich rocks located near the sites of ancient lakes should be the priority for upcoming visits to the

When you think of galaxies, you first think of glorious pinwheels filled with stars. But now astrophysicists have found something deeply peculiar: what seem to be galaxies in the early Universe with few stars – if they even have any stars at all.   It’s thought that these star-less galaxies, also known as dark galaxies,

NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson sometimes has tears in her eyes when she says she won’t be going in to space again. The former International Space Station boss has logged a whopping 665 floating days in space, more than any other American.   It’s clear from her beaming smile and boisterous, frequent laughs that she loved

There’s something very special about all the awesome research funded by NASA – it’s accessible, for free, to everyone. It was a particularly special moment when NASA announced this shift to open access back in 2016. Not only would all published research funded by the space agency be available at no cost, the agency also

Telescopes around the world have joined forces to try to provide us with our first photograph of a black hole. That’s still a few months off, at least, but all that staring at a black hole is already starting to produce results.   In 2013, the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) radio telescope in Chile joined

Ever dreamt of stepping onto a faraway planet? Well, NASA has you covered with this incredible virtual planet simulator. The Exoplanet Travel Bureau drops you into vastly different star systems to explore distant worlds.   You can enjoy Trappist-1e’s blood red sky, a planet we now know has a large iron core. (NASA/Exoplanet Travel Bureau)

Sometime after August 2008, the US Department of Defence contracted dozens of researchers to look into some very, very out-there aerospace technologies, including never-before-seen methods of propulsion, lift, and stealth.   Two researchers came back with a 34-page report for the propulsion category, titled “Warp Drive, Dark Energy, and the Manipulation of Extra Dimensions.” The

Pluto may not be categorised as a planet any more, but it still holds plenty of fascination. For instance, how did the dwarf planet form, and why is it so different from the planets? By examining its chemical composition, researchers have come up with a new idea: Pluto is made of comets.   According to

The famed EM Drive is a bust – that’s the take-home message from a team of physicists who have tested the controversial fuel-less propulsion system that appears to produce thrust while violating Newton’s third law.   Which means physics as we know it might be safe for a little bit longer.  Researchers from TU Dresden