Space

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 data

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 Universe’s

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 dwarf

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 of

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 landing,

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 and

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 Ryugu’s

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 jets

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 and

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 than

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 this

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 candidates,

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 should

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 by

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,

According to the Big Bang cosmological model, our Universe began 13.8 billion years ago when all the matter and energy in the cosmos began expanding. This period of “cosmic inflation” is believed to be what accounts for the large-scale structure of the Universe and why space and the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) appear to be largely uniform in all

NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has only been on the job less than two months, and already it’s ponying up the planet goods. The exoplanet-hunting space telescope has found two candidate planets, and there are plenty more on the horizon. The two candidate planets are called Pi Mensae c, orbiting bright yellow dwarf star

In certain times of the year, at the polar regions of Earth, just after the Sun has set, sometimes you can see electric-blue clouds high up in the sky. These clouds are called noctilucent or polar mesospheric clouds (PMC) and apart from being exceptionally pretty, they can also help scientists understand turbulence in the atmosphere.

So far, astronomers have identified thousands of exoplanets out there beyond the reaches of the Solar System, but only a rare few are the stuff of legend. Such is the case with an Earth-like exoplanet, found orbiting a star called 40 Eridani A – Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry’s preferred location for Vulcan, the home

Elon Musk and his rocket company, SpaceX, have revealed who will fly their spaceship around the Moon for the first time: a Japanese entrepreneur and billionaire named Yusaku Maezawa. “Finally I can tell you that I choose to go to the Moon!” Maezawa said during an announcement Monday evening. Maezawa revealed that he has purchased all

The line between star and planet might be a lot finer than we think. Brown dwarfs are celestial objects that are more massive than a planet, but not quite massive enough to be stars. But astronomers have discovered two brown dwarfs that are so massive they’re challenging our understanding of star evolution. They’re called Epsilon

Most stars are just out there in space, doing their star thing, but not the pulsar called RX J0806.4-4123. It’s been caught doing something that’s never been seen before. It’s emitting infrared radiation – and only infrared radiation – at a huge distance. Long-distance emission from neutron stars is nothing new. But the fact RX

Elon Musk, the founder of the rocket company SpaceX, is about to reveal who the company’s first lunar space tourist will be. “SpaceX has signed the world’s first private passenger to fly around the Moon aboard our BFR launch vehicle – an important step toward enabling access for everyday people who dream of travelling to

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 Bloomington

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 determine

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 around

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

Hubble has embarked on a new observation mission: to study the farthest reaches of the Universe, using some of the most massive objects in the Universe – galaxy clusters. And this newly released picture shows how. At the centre is Abell 370, a cluster of a few hundred galaxies located around 4 billion light-years from

The tiny pressure leak in the International Space Station (ISS) may have been found and fixed, but it is still causing all sorts of problems. After the leak was discovered on the Russian spacecraft attached to the ISS, it was determined that the 2 millimetre hole was made by a human hand. A special commission

Within near-Earth space, there are over 18,000 asteroids whose orbit occasionally brings them close to Earth. Over the course of millions of years, some of these Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) – which range from a few meters to tens of kilometers in diameter – may even collide with Earth. It is for this reason that the

A Russian cosmonaut aboard the International Space Station (ISS) posted a video Monday showing that a hole found in the Russian part of the station earlier this month had been sealed. The video, featuring cosmonaut Sergei Prokopyev on Monday, showed the two-millimetre hole now covered with a black sealant and hidden behind a fabric flap.

A new study of the binary asteroid Patroclus-Menoetius has revealed some clues about the chaotic and turbulent beginnings of our Solar System – primarily when Uranus and Neptune were bullied away from the Sun by Jupiter and Saturn. The pair of asteroids, both a little over 100 km (62 miles) in diameter, are part of

A massive number of new signals have been discovered coming from the notorious repeating fast radio source FRB 121102 – and we can thank artificial intelligence for these findings. Researchers at the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) project Breakthrough Listen applied machine learning to comb through existing data, and found 72 fast radio bursts that

Aurora chasers, get your cameras ready. A huge hole has opened in the Sun’s corona, which means we’re officially on geomagnetic storm watch – with auroras incoming across a huge swathe of North America. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has issued a storm watch for a G2-level solar storm on September 11. That’s

Well, this sure is one parade that’s getting rained out of existence. A spectacular astronomical event that had been predicted for 2022 now isn’t going to happen after all. Early in 2017, scientists forecast the collision of two stars in the constellation Cygnus – something that would result in a rare and wonderful phenomenon visible to

In 2003, the European Space Agency (ESA) launched the Small Missions for Advanced Research in Technology-1 (SMART-1) lunar orbiter. After taking 13 months to reach the Moon using a Solar Electric Propulsion (SEP) system, the orbiter then spent the next three years studying the lunar surface. Then, on September 3rd, 2006, the mission came to an end

It’s been 12 years since everyone’s favourite dwarf planet Pluto officially lost planet status. And ever since there’s been no end to the debate over whether or not that was the right call. Now a team of experts say the reason it was demoted in the first place isn’t valid. And, you guessed it, they’re

It’s been 12 years since everyone’s favourite dwarf planet Pluto officially lost planet status. And ever since there’s been no end to the debate over whether or not that was the right call. Now a team of experts say the reason it was demoted in the first place isn’t valid. And, you guessed it, they’re

There are many strange galaxies out there in space, but about 300 million light-years away is one that’s really something. It’s called AM 0644-741, or the Lindsay-Shapley Ring, and it’s what is known as a ring galaxy – shaped like a ring, with a darker region in the centre. Now astronomers have studied AM 0644-741

If you look at the Moon through a telescope, you might see something curious on the surface. The bright, undulating patterns are called lunar swirls, and their origins have been an ongoing mystery – not least because they are associated with powerful, localised magnetic fields. Now scientists think they may have solved a part of

If humans are going to send tiny probes across the vast distances of space, the designs of their sails will need to strike a delicate balance of mass, strength, and reflectivity. Now engineers have invented a nanomaterial that might just do the trick, helping us push space probes closer to light speed.  The new material,

Irish astrophysicist Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell has been awarded a prestigious Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, for discovering pulsars all the way back in 1967. A Cambridge PhD student at the time, Bell Burnell spotted a faint, repeating signal in the reams and reams of data she had to sift through at the newly

The first map of Jupiter’s magnetic field at a range of depths is in, and it solidifies something we already knew: that it’s really, really, really weird. Aside from that, though, it’s unlike anything else planetary scientists have ever seen. We already knew that the gas giant’s external magnetic field was an odd duck. For

There’s something strange over Saturn’s north pole. A tremendous structure towering high above the clouds indicates that the planet’s peculiar hexagonal formation is much, much bigger than was initially apparent. The data comes from Cassini, which, a year after its demise plunging into Saturn’s opaque atmosphere, is still leading us to new discoveries. When the

From continuing observations of a neutron star collision we caught last year, astrophysicists have found something wild – the crash spewed forth a thin jet of superfast particles into space, travelling at nearly the speed of light, but appearing to move much faster thanks to an optical illusion. The collision was observed in August of

Rocket launches are difficult. They’re expensive, they require an insane amount of fuel, their exhausts blast pollution into the atmosphere. One concept that seems straight out of science fiction could solve these problems: an elevator connecting Earth and space. And now Japanese engineers are about to start testing one. On September 11, a team from

Last week astronauts on board the International Space Station (ISS) awoke to a worrying message from flight control. Hidden somewhere on board the ISS was a tiny pressure leak that was slowly allowing air to seep out of the spacecraft and into the abyss. The six astronauts on board were not in any imminent danger,