Your Daily Science News Source from Around the Globe
If you’re a fan of science fiction, chances are you encountered a few franchises where humanity has spread throughout the known Universe. The ships that allow them to do this,…
The International Space Station (ISS), in Earth orbit at hundreds of kilometres altitude, is not perfectly airtight. Every day, the cabin loses a minute amount of air, monitored carefully so…
In 1604, a white dwarf star went supernova. This is quite normal behaviour for a white dwarf star; but this one, at a distance of just 20,000 light-years from Earth,…
There’s a lot going on in the centre of our galaxy. The Milky Way’s core is home to a supermassive black hole as massive as 4 million Suns called Sagittarius…
Life was trying, but it wasn’t working out. As the Late Devonian period dragged on, more and more living things died out, culminating in one of the greatest mass extinction…
A car-size asteroid flew within about 1,830 miles (2,950 kilometers) of Earth on Sunday. That’s a remarkably close shave – the closest ever recorded, in fact, according to asteroid trackers…
Just as you thought it was safe to go back to ignoring Betelgeuse, the red giant star started acting up again. After its first round of dimming, and then brightening,…
Around 15,000 light-years away, an active black hole seems to be periodically lighting up an otherwise unremarkable cloud of gas with gamma rays. But there’s a catch. The gas cloud…
NASA is actively monitoring a strange anomaly in Earth’s magnetic field: a giant region of lower magnetic intensity in the skies above the planet, stretching out between South America and…
Earth is a genuinely magical place. We know that’s not the sort of thing you’d expect to read on a science website, but just take a look at the photo…
The sudden dimming of one of the brightest stars in the night sky, Betelgeuse, could be due to a dust cloud spewing up from its surface, astronomers said on Thursday.…
NASA’s Mars Odyssey probe has been orbiting the Red Planet for almost 19 years now, making it the longest continually active spacecraft in orbit around a planet other than Earth.…
We’ve found the fastest known star in the Milky Way. In the extreme environment at the centre of our galaxy, a newly discovered star called S4714 orbits the supermassive black…
One of the world’s most prominent astronomical observatories has a hole. On Monday, a 3-inch-thick (76-mm-thick) cable at the Arecibo Observatory broke, tearing a gash 100 feet (30 metres) long…
A very long time ago, in the very early Universe, scientists have discovered a galaxy that seems way too advanced to have grown in the short timespan since the Big…
When NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) arrived in orbit around the Moon in 2009, scientists immediately started firing lasers at it. More specifically, they were firing lasers at a small…
The dwarf planet Ceres was once assumed to be a fairly primitive chunk of rock. But just a few years ago, NASA’s space probe Dawn revealed that there’s more to…
Jupiter’s moon Ganymede is a pretty special chunk of rock. It’s the largest and most massive moon in the Solar System. It’s the only Solar System moon that generates its…
There are countless exoplanets in the Milky Way, but some are more hardcore than others. Take a type known as hot super-Earths. These planets are nuts. Imagine a rocky world…
NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on 30 July, carrying a host of cutting-edge technology including high-definition video equipment and the first interplanetary helicopter. Many of the…
After a two-month gap, SpaceX has resumed launching batches of dozens of satellites in its gambit to blanket Earth with high-speed internet access. The satellites are a new “VisorSat” variety…
When the Sun sets in a blaze of blue and night falls over the dusty plains of Mars, something weird and wonderful occurs. High up above the surface, the atmosphere…
Up to half the calcium in the Universe – and that includes our bones and teeth – is thought to come from exploding supernova stars, and researchers have now been…
Deep in the thick, poisonous clouds wrapped around Venus, the atmosphere is behaving very oddly. A giant, previously unknown planet-scale wall of cloud travels westward around the planet every 4.9…