Your Daily Science News Source from Around the Globe
Any species reaching for the stars is bound to have its fingertips singed. Probably more than once. One of NASA’s latest posts on the Astronomy Picture of the Day website…
Hanging about in space can do pretty strange things to the human body, which is poorly adapted to life without gravity. It can create a slew of health problems, keeping…
Staring at the night sky can be a mind-boggling, existential experience, so every once in a while, it’s nice to see a friendly face staring back at us. In a…
Whenever we hear of stars discovered that formed just after the Big Bang, they’re very far away, in the far reaches of the visible Universe. But now astronomers have spotted…
Sick of life right now on Earth? Head to Mars instead. Virtually, that is. Google Mars lets you explore the Red Planet without the 140-million-mile (225-million-kilometre) journey. It’s one of…
All over the world, some truly groundbreaking telescopes are being built that will usher in a new age of astronomy. Sites include the mountain of Mauna Kea in Hawaii, Australia,…
On October 19th, 2017, the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System-1 (Pan-STARRS-1) in Hawaii announced the first-ever detection of an interstellar asteroid, named 1I/2017 U1 (AKA ‘Oumuamua). In the…
Just days after we learned about the demise of the Kepler telescope, another NASA mission has come to an end. Tens of thousands of kilometres above the largest object in…
A major problem with Mars missions: Bringing enough fuel for a return journey. In a striking new first-person account in IEEE Spectrum, NASA team lead Kurt Leucht writes about how…
Astronomers just observed the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy sucking blobs of hot gas toward their doom at 30 percent of the speed of…
We often think of space as peaceful and serene. In reality it’s filled with violent events, including collisions on the galactic scale. We know our own Milky Way has likely…
NASA announced Tuesday that Kepler, an orbital telescope that’s been spotting and analyzing distant planets for the past nine years, has run out of fuel and will no longer carry…
NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has just made history by making the closest ever approach to the Sun by a human-made object. On 29 October 2018, at 1:04 pm EDT (17:04…
Nearly 200,000 light-years from Earth, the Small Magellanic Cloud is dying. Slowly, over vast time, the galaxy is losing its ability to form new stars – eventually to fade into…
For decades the existence of weird space clouds in Earth’s orbit has been speculative and controversial, but new research looks to validate their strange reality after all. The Kordylewski clouds…
Looking up at space reminds us that everyone and everything on Earth is stuck together on a big space rock that’s drifting through an infinite black void. Unfortunately, terrestrial concerns…
An awful lot can happen in any given week, and it’s no easy task keeping up with all the excitement – both in the world of science and beyond. To…
What would convince you that aliens existed? The question came up recently at a conference on astrobiology, held at Stanford University in California. Several ideas were tossed around – unusual…
Mars is a sizable planet about nine times the mass of our moon. The latest scientific research suggests Mars, despite looking like a giant desert, may harbour enough subsurface water…
The entire time the Moon has been sitting up there, quietly orbiting Earth, it turns out it’s actually been doing something incredible. Something that could help teach us about the…
High over the peak of a long dead volcano on the Martian equator, a feathery white cloud stretches across the sky. At first glance it looks like the plume of…
There’s something out there, watching us from the night sky. We can’t see it, but it can see us. European Southern Observatory (EOS) has recently released a new and eerie…
Deep inside the diffuse haze of gas and dust that surround the smallest galaxies, dark matter could be clumping into cold droplets called ‘Bose stars’. Of course, we don’t even…
Scientists have previously suspected supermassive black holes can merge together, and have seen signs of these cosmic collisions on a smaller scale. Now new research backs up the hypothesis –…
After a gyroscope failure put the Hubble Space Telescope out of action on October 5, NASA engineers finally see an end to its troubles. They have its backup gyroscope operating…
Mars has long been thought of as dry and barren – unable to harbour life. But research over the past few years indicates that there is most likely some briny…
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…
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 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…
Black holes are a mystery – dense regions of space where there’s so much gravity not even light can escape. They also have a strange relationship with magnetic fields that’s…
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 –…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…