On a clear night, you might be able to point out a few constellations — maybe the Big Dipper, Orion’s Belt, and your Zodiac sign. But to see the Hulk and Albert Einstein, you’re going to need help from a powerful space telescope.   On June 11, 2008, NASA launched the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. Every

The European Space Agency (ESA) will launch its BepiColombo mission to the planet Mercury from its spaceport near the equator in Kourou, French Guyana, on October 20. My involvement in the mission means that I will be anxiously following the journey as the spacecraft carries out a series of tricky manoeuvres, culminating in its final

The streets of Chengdu in western China could soon be lit up by an artificial satellite moon in the night-time, rather than the more conventional streetlights, if an ambitious plan by a private aerospace company gets the go-ahead.   The thinking is to save a hefty sum in electricity costs, according to Wu Chunfeng, chairman

There’s a lot of stuff out there in the dark, far-flung reaches of the early Universe that we’re only just starting to discover. But this one’s a real doozy – the early formation of a huge supercluster of galaxies, located 11 billion light-years away – just 2.3 billion years after the Big Bang.   It’s

Last week, NASA astronaut Air Force Colonel Nick Hague faced death as he and his commander, Alexei Ovchinin, plummeted to Earth following an aborted Soyuz launch. Outside, the world held its breath as the spacecraft returned in what NASA called a “ballistic descent mode“. Inside the tiny capsule, according to Hague, things got pretty rough.

A wee baby star at the tender age of just 2 million years has revealed itself to be quite the precocious little cosmic object. Astronomers have discovered it has not one, but four planets in the protoplanetary disc of dust and gas that surrounds it – and they are all gargantuan, with the biggest coming

Elon Musk is hell-bent on colonizing Mars. That’s the spirit with which he founded SpaceX, his rocket company, in 2002. Musk was frustrated that NASA wasn’t doing more to get people to the red planet – and concerned a backup plan for humanity wasn’t being developed (for when Earth becomes an uninhabitable wasteland).   Since

For almost two centuries, scientists have theorized that life may be distributed throughout the Universe by meteoroids, asteroids, planetoids, and other astronomical objects. This theory, known as Panspermia, is based on the idea that microorganisms and the chemical precursors of life are able to survive being transported from one star system to the next.   Expanding

An estimated 530 million people around the world had their eyes on NASA astronaut Neil Armstrong as he took one “giant leap for mankind” on July 20, 1969. Armstrong cemented his role in history that day, becoming the first person to step foot on the Moon. Today, walking on the lunar surface is an honour only 11

It’s been a big week for NASA. First the much-loved Hubble Space Telescope entered “safe mode” after one of the gyroscopes that points it in the right direction failed. Then there was a mid-flight failure of a Russian Soyuz rocket on Thursday morning, resulting in the (safe!) emergency landing of cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin and astronaut Nick

An astronaut and cosmonaut survived a harrowing mid-flight failure of a Russian Soyuz rocket on Thursday morning. But human access to space is now on hold indefinitely while authorities investigate the launch failure.   After NASA retired its space shuttle fleet in 2011 without a replacement, the US had no American spaceship to fly people to and from the

Booster rockets carrying a Soyuz spacecraft with a Russian and a US astronaut on board headed for the International Space Station failed mid-air on Thursday, forcing the crew to make an emergency landing.   NASA said that the crew was safe and was making an emergency landing in Kazakhstan where the unsuccessful launch took place.

When the violent death of a massive star concluded with a whimper instead of a bang, astronomers weren’t sure what to make of it. Now it turns out that oddly anaemic death indicates a never-before-seen cosmic phenomenon – the birth of a binary neutron star system, two dead stellar remnants locked in a death spiral.

For a while, astronomers were puzzled by the extraordinary abundance of three metals seen in the heart of our galaxy. As it turns out, the whole thing was simply an illusion, new research has found.   Earlier this year, researchers released a paper with a really bizarre finding. After examining the spectra of red giant

Astrobiology has advanced in leaps and bounds over the past few years, which means NASA really should think about revisiting its strategy on alien hunting. This advice comes courtesy of the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, who under the direction of Congress issued a report calling the space agency to update its

Stars have planets, and planets have satellites we call moons; but can a moon have its own satellite? And if it did, what would we call it? In a paper currently up on pre-print resource arXiv, astronomers Juna Kollmeier of the Carnegie Institution for Science and Sean Raymond of the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Bordeaux have

Way out in the Australian desert, a new observatory is making history. In a little more than a year, the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) has detected a tremendous 20 of the mysterious signals known as fast radio bursts.   These are not new signals from the famous repeating fast radio burst source FRB

Few moons in the Solar System are as intriguing as Jupiter’s moon Europa. A global ocean of salt water almost certainly surrounds the moon – and it holds more water than any ocean on Earth.   Above this immense sea, where surface temperatures dip to minus 300 degrees Fahrenheit (-184 degrees Celsius), a crust of

Basically a double star fail. Source link

The Hubble Space Telescope is currently operating in safe mode, with all science operations suspended, after one of the three gyroscopes used to aim the telescope failed on Friday 5 October.   NASA was quick to offer reassurance: “Hubble’s instruments still are fully operational and are expected to produce excellent science for years to come,”

Six years after Voyager 1 officially left the Solar System, it looks like its companion probe, Voyager 2, is getting close to the interstellar boundary as well. According to NASA, the spacecraft has started to detect the same increase in cosmic radiation that hit Voyager 1 just before it finally entered interstellar space.   Although

The sixth largest meteorite recorded in Michigan has just been brought to the attention of experts over 80 years after its discovery. After living a humble life as a 10 kilogram (22 pound) doorstop in a local farm, the space rock is now getting the attention it deserves.   “I could tell right away that

When it comes time to begin conducting regular crewed missions to Mars, and perhaps even establishing a permanent outpost there, astronauts and potential Martian settlers will have to know how to work with the local environment.   Remember that scene in The Martian where astronaut Mark Watney (Matt Damon) is forced to grow his own

The Kepler mission is coming to an end. The planet-hunting spacecraft that transformed our understanding of exoplanets and other solar systems is almost out of fuel. What little fuel remains is being held in reserve to ensure that the last of its data can be sent home.   The Kepler team has placed the spacecraft

In the last weeks before it plunged into the stormy heart of Saturn a year ago, Cassini did something no other probe has done before. It swooped in between the planet and its signature rings, instrumentation furiously collecting data all way until the absolute end.   And in those final orbits, it was bathed in

Using the most detailed map of the galaxy produced so far, astronomers have spotted more than a dozen high-speed stars that seem to be zooming in our direction – and they are potentially just a fraction of the total number of stars on similar headings.   Interestingly, the study was intended to find high velocity

It may only be 2 millimetres in diameter, but that tiny hole in Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft docked on the International Space Station is creating a much bigger drama than depressurisation.   After Roscosmos head Dmitry Rogozin went on TV Monday to say the Russian investigation had determined that the hole was not a “manufacturing defect,”

Matter ejected from a spinning disc of doom surrounding a black hole a mere 15,000 light years away has produced some of the most energetic rays of light ever witnessed from an object of its kind.   The insanely powerful photons of gamma radiation were produced by a never-before-seen phenomenon surrounding a miniature quasar. The

Given the abundance of moons in our own Solar System, you’d think there are heaps orbiting exoplanets, too. Such exomoons have been elusive until now – but it looks like that has finally changed.   Last year, astronomers Alex Teachey and David Kipping of Columbia University announced they’d spotted the very first exomoon candidate in

After studying hundreds of recently discovered exploding stars, physicists have concluded it’s unlikely there are sufficient numbers of primordial black holes out there to account for the dark matter phenomenon.   This doesn’t mean the category of material referred to as massive compact halo objects (MACHOs) can’t contribute to the unseen 84 percent of the

The hypothetical, massive outer Solar System body Planet X is still proving elusive, but the hunt for it has yielded up a different find: a tiny dwarf planet, roughly 2.5 times Pluto’s distance at the time it was found.   It’s called 2015 TG387 and nicknamed “the Goblin”. Also, it’s pretty small even for a

They don’t call Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson ‘The Mountain’ for nothing. In 2015, the strong man and Game of Thrones actor broke a millennium-old record by taking – or more accurately, staggering – five steps with a 650 kilogram (1,430 pound) log on his back.   To most of us, this was simply an extraordinary example

NASA’s got a whole new plan. It wants boots on the Moon in 10 years and on Mars in 20. Give or take. On Wednesday, the space agency announced its detailed National Space Exploration Plan to achieve the President’s lofty goals set out in his December 2017 Space Policy Directive-1.   Those bold plans include: planning a new Moon

NASA is targeting technosignatures in its renewed effort to detect alien civilizations. Congress asked NASA to re-boot its search for other civilizations a few months ago. Their first step towards that goal is the NASA Technosignatures Workshop, held in Houston from September 26th to 28th, 2018.   If you’ve never stared out to space at night

Earlier this week, Japan’s space agency JAXA made history by landing a pair of hopping rovers on an asteroid known as Ryugu, and sending back the first-ever images from the surface of a space rock.   If that wasn’t awe-inspiring enough, JAXA has just released not only more images, but even a small video from

Roughly 24,000 light-years away from Earth, in the constellation of Cassiopeia, is a dead star that shouldn’t exist. Not, that is, according to current theory. The neutron star, accreting material from a much larger binary companion, is spewing out relativistic jets.   The problem is that it also has a strong magnetic field. And relativistic

A team of researchers in the UK have observed matter falling into a black hole at 30 percent the speed of light. This is much faster than anything previously observed. The high velocity is a result of misaligned discs of material rotating around the black hole.   The galaxy in the study is named PG211+143

A satellite orbiting Mars has taken a remarkable yet potentially somber photo of NASA’s longest-lived robot on the red planet. That robot is the Mars Opportunity rover, which is about the size of a golf cart, landed in January 2004, and was supposed to last 90 days.   However, Opportunity has explored Mars for more

We all know that Earth is old, but it’s hard to put into perspective just how old it is. After all, what does 4.5 billion years really mean? How do you even comprehend that amount of time with our short-lived human brains?   Well, Business Insider has done a pretty incredible job of it in

After a Hawaiian telescope spotted an object called ‘Oumuamua flying through space in October 2017, astronomers realised it was weird. Very weird. The object had a cigar-like shape and was 750 feet (228 metres) by 115 feet (35 metres) in size, or roughly as large as a skyscraper. It was dark red in colour and

Here in the Solar System, the search for extraterrestrial life is focused on microbes. But in recent years, projects such as Kepler and HARPS have done something incredible, exploding our awareness and knowledge of planets beyond the Solar System.   To date, 3,779 planets have been confirmed from a variety of observatories, with thousands more

It’s one of the biggest questions in the Solar System: was there ever life on Mars? And, if yes, will we ever find evidence for it? We still don’t have the answers, but new research has revealed a promising place to look for clues.   Instead of scouring the dusty plains and mountains, maybe we

On a primitive piece of space rock more than 100 million miles (160 million kilometres) from Earth, two tiny robotic explorers took their first cautious “hops” this weekend – the first movements made by any human-made spacecraft across the surface of an asteroid.   The twin rovers were deposited Friday atop the half-mile-wide asteroid Ryugu

Elon Musk has provided several new, rare, and telling glimpses into how his rocket company, SpaceX, is building a spacecraft to reach Mars. On September 17, Musk announced that SpaceX would fly Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa around the moon on the company’s Big Falcon Rocket or BFR. During that event, Musk showed off new renderings of the launch system,

A really weird form of matter found in ultradense objects such as neutron stars is looking like a good candidate for the strongest material in the Universe. According to new calculations, it clocks in at a massive 10 billion times stronger than steel.   “This is a crazy-big figure,” physicist Charles Horowitz of Indiana University

In of August of 2016, astronomers from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) confirmed the existence of an Earth-like planet around Proxima Centauri – the closest star to our Solar System.   In addition, they confirmed that this planet (Proxima b) orbited within its star’s habitable zone. Since that time, multiple studies have been conducted to

SpaceX, the rocket company founded by Elon Musk, plans to launch a private citizen around the moon. The company’s announcement came Thursday night via Twitter, and it included a rendering of the spaceship that will make the voyage: the Big Falcon Rocket, or BFR.   “SpaceX has signed the world’s first private passenger to fly

The world’s most powerful telescopes have a lot of work to do. They’re tasked with helping us unravel the mysteries of the universe, like dark matter and dark energy. They’re burdened with helping us find other habitable worlds that might host life. And they’re busy with a multitude of other tasks, like documenting the end