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, maybe they use a warp drive, maybe they “fold space,” maybe have a faster-than-light (FTL) or “jump” drive.   It’s a cool idea, the thought

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 that a liveable atmospheric pressure can be maintained, and to identify leaks.   Now the latter has come to pass, just two years after the

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, was visible to the naked eye, and documented by astronomers around the world, including German astronomer Johannes Kepler.   Kepler’s Supernova, as it came to

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 A*, and the environment around it is intense.   Blowing out from this region is a nuclear galactic wind. It’s carved out two huge gamma-ray

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 events our planet has ever witnessed, approximately 359 million years ago.   The culprit responsible for so much death may not have been local, scientists

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 and a catalogue compiled by Sormano Astronomical Observatory in Italy.   Because of its size, the space rock most likely wouldn’t have posed any danger to people

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, Betelgeuse has now started to dim once again.   Moreover, this new dimming is inconsistent with Betelgeuse’s current brightness variation cycle – so, once again,

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 is around 100 light-years from the black hole – and exactly how the cloud is pulsing in time with it is a mystery.   It’s

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 southwest Africa.   This vast, developing phenomenon, called the South Atlantic Anomaly, has intrigued and concerned scientists for years, and perhaps none more so than

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 above – a pre-dawn picture taken by an Expedition 62 crew member on the International Space Station (ISS) back in March.   In this image,

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. The mystery has enthralled skywatchers since the star – part of the Orion constellation – began to lose luminosity last October, with some experts suggesting

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.   That incredible tour of duty means it’s witnessed lots of strange things we can’t easily see from our terrestrial vantage point, and this stunning,

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 hole Sagittarius A*.   On its orbital journey, S4714 reaches a velocity of around 8 percent of the speed of light – an absolutely jaw-dropping

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 in the reflector dish of the 20-acre radio telescope in Puerto Rico.   The observatory had just reopened after a temporary closure due to Tropical

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 Bang. It’s called SPT0418-47, and it’s lurking 12.4 billion light-years away – when the Universe was just 1.4 billion years old.   What makes it

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 reflector array roughly the size of a paperback book, trying to bounce light back to Earth. And after almost 10 years, they have finally succeeded.

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 this asteroid belt body than meets the eye.   Now, we’re starting to find out just how much more. Ceres sits in the asteroid belt between

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 own magnetic field. It has the most liquid water of any Solar System body. And now, scientists have discovered, it may have the largest impact

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 like Earth, but up to 10 times more massive; now zoom it in so close to its star, it takes just 10 days or fewer

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 tools are designed as experimental steps toward human exploration of the red planet. Crucially, Perseverance is equipped with a device called the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment,

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 to make them less shiny to the ground and especially to astronomers’ telescopes. But researchers say the spacecraft’s experimental new feature, while helpful, won’t fully

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 begins to glow with an ultraviolet light, sometimes pulsing, as nitrogen and oxygen combine into nitric oxide.   This invisible glow, first revealed by the

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 able to get unprecedented insight at how these ultra-rare, calcium-rich supernovae reach the end of their lives.   The never-before-seen look at how these stellar

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 days – and apparently has been doing so since at least 1983.   It can extend up to 7,500 kilometres (4,660 miles) long, stretching across

SpaceX on Tuesday successfully completed a flight of less than a minute of the largest prototype ever tested of the future rocket Starship, which the company hopes to use one day to colonize Mars.   “Mars is looking real,” SpaceX founder Elon Musk tweeted in response to a fan. The current Starship prototype is fairly

In recent decades, over 4,000 extrasolar planets have been confirmed beyond our Solar System. With so many planets available for study, astronomers have learned a great deal about the types of planets that exist out there and what kind of conditions are prevalent.   For instance, they have been able to get a better idea of just

The hunt for exoplanets in our galaxy is a deeply important endeavour. The more exoplanets we find, the better we can understand our own Solar System – and how life emerges in the Universe. To date, over 4,000 exoplanets have been confirmed – but a new discovery could widen the search, helping us to find

The Sun is a wild place. Up in our skies, it appears pretty much the same day to day, but when you look closer, our star is often riotous with turbulent plasma. One of the wildest things the Sun can do is flare – belch out colossal loops of plasma that utterly dwarf our entire

In February 1987, the sky lit up. In the Large Magellanic Cloud, 167,644 light-years away, astronomers watched as a massive star died in a spectacular supernova, the closest to Earth in hundreds of years.   But when the fireworks died down, something was missing. There was no sign of the neutron star that should have

The question of whether ancient life could have existed on Mars centres on the water that once flowed there, but new research published Monday suggests that many of the Red Planet’s valleys were gouged by icy glaciers not rivers.    The study in Nature Geoscience, which comes amid a flurry of new Mars missions trying

It’s easy to think of black holes as voracious destruction machines, slurping up everything in their immediate vicinity. But that’s not always the case. The environments around active supermassive black holes are complex, and last year, a team of astronomers showed that there’s a safe zone around each supermassive black hole in which thousands of

A dead star 14,350 light-years away has just become the most important clue in solving the mystery of fast radio bursts. Earlier this year, it spat out a colossal, milliseconds-long radio flare – and now the first published analysis of the event notes its similarity to the enigmatic extragalactic signals.   Fast radio bursts (FRBs)

SpaceX just achieved an historic feat that even its CEO, Elon Musk, thought improbable when he founded the rocket company in 2002: flying people to and from space. On Sunday afternoon, NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley safely careened back to Earth after a 27-million-mile mission in orbit around the planet. The men rode SpaceX’s new

No matter where you are, where you’ve been, and where you’re going, it’s always good to see home. And we all love seeing pictures of our home planet, as seen from space. The latest image of the Terran System comes from China’s Mars mission, Tianwen-1, which launched on July 23. It captured an image of

After travelling more than 27 million miles around planet Earth, NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley are headed home inside SpaceX’s new Crew Dragon spaceship. Despite the threat of Hurricane Isaias strafing coastal Florida with brutal weather, the two-man crew undocked their ship from the International Space Station Saturday evening, beginning the return of the first

The Crew Dragon spacecraft, produced by private company SpaceX, is scheduled to return from the International Space Station (ISS) and splash down in the Atlantic ocean on August 2.   Contingent on a favourable weather forecast and a successful final week at the ISS, NASA astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley will begin the undocking

Despite the threat of Hurricane Isaias strafing coastal Florida with brutal weather, NASA and SpaceX are “go” to return the first commercial astronauts to planet Earth this weekend.   SpaceX made history in May when it became the first company to launch a crewed spaceship to the International Space Station. In doing so, Elon Musk‘s rocket company also revived

Exoplanets have been a particularly hot topic of late. More than 4,000 of them have been discovered since the first in 1995. Now one more can potentially be added to the list. This one is orbiting Gliese 3470, a red dwarf star located in the constellation Cancer. What makes this discovery particularly interesting is that this planet

Every good story deserves a sequel – and the strange white cloud spotted above an extinct Martian volcano back in 2018 just got one, because the stunning fog trail has made another appearance.   In fact, this is the latest instalment in a long-running series, and this time scientists were looking out expectantly for the

Before our Solar System had planets, it had planetesimals. Scientists think that most of the meteorites that have struck Earth are fragments of these planetesimals. Scientists also think that these planetesimals either melted completely, very early in their history, or that they remained as little more than collections of rocks, or “rubble piles”.   But

NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, who made spaceflight history on May 30 by becoming the first people to launch to orbit aboard a SpaceX vehicle, might see their weekend homecoming plans thrown to the wind.   After docking SpaceX’s Crew Dragon Endeavour ship to the International Space Station and spending two months there, the men are preparing

Away from the glare of civilisation’s blinding lights, an unimpeded view of the night sky makes you feel like you’re standing on the shores of eternity. But there is one place on Earth where the sights stretch just that little bit further than anywhere else.   Researchers have measured the clarity of the stars at

Mars 2020, the spaceship carrying NASA’s new rover Perseverance to the Red Planet, experienced technical difficulties and was temporarily running on essential systems only, the agency said Thursday.   “Data indicate the spacecraft had entered a state known as safe mode, likely because a part of the spacecraft was a little colder than expected while

A rocket carrying NASA’s most ambitious Mars rover yet has launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, though its crucial journey through space is just beginning. The Perseverance rover and its landing apparatus is packed inside the top of a 197-foot Atlas V rocket at Cape Canaveral, Florida, Thursday morning. At 7:50 am ET, the rocket’s boosters fired and

On Thursday morning, NASA will launch its fifth Mars rover: A robotic scientist the size of an SUV. The $US2.4 billion, nuclear-powered vehicle, named Perseverance (“Percy” for short) is designed to trundle along the Martian surface, mine for signs of ancient life, capture high-quality video and audio, and collect rock and soil samples for an eventual return

Not all ice ages are equally brutal. In the most extreme glaciation events known to science, ice stretches out from Earth’s polar regions and extends all the way into lower latitudes, literally reshaping the face of the planet.   Evidence for such epic transitions can be found in the geologic record, most recently in formidable

Elon Musk‘s growing constellation of internet satellites has been sending streaks of bright light across night skies around the world. Even the biggest comet to pass Earth in 25 years wasn’t spared.   A striking photo showing Comet Neowise behind those streaks of light shows how easily the satellites can upstage observations of distant objects

For the first time, scientists have observed that ‘megaripples’ on Mars – huge sand waves seen on the Martian surface – are moving structures, and not ancient relics stuck in place since the Red Planet’s distant past.   Megaripples, which also occur in deserts on Earth, are generally larger than smaller sand ripples, and are