On 6 August 2012, after an epic six-month journey, NASA rover Curiosity finally arrived at her new home on Mars. This week marks seven Earth years since touchdown, and we’re celebrating Curiosity’s Landing Day with some of the marvels it has brought us. It’s an isolated existence for the little rover, all alone in the

On Wednesday, July 24th, the people of the Great Lakes region were treated to a spectacular sight when a meteor streaked across the sky. The resulting fireball was observed by many onlookers, as well as the University of Western Ontario’s All-Sky Camera Network. This array runs across southern Ontario and Quebec and is maintained in

Just like our own Milky Way, most of the universe’s galaxies are shaped like spirals, with long swirling arms of cosmic matter stemming from a bright core. Still, they don’t always appear like that to us. When viewed from the side, spiral galaxies can look deceivingly linear, as a new image from the Hubble Space

Another ancient star has been found lurking in the Milky Way. Around 35,000 light-years away, a red giant star named SMSS J160540.18–144323.1 was found to have the lowest iron levels of any star yet analysed in the galaxy. This means that it’s one of the oldest stars in the Universe, probably belonging to the second

Astronauts on board the International Space Station (ISS) have to do just about everything for themselves. Living within this constantly orbiting laboratory, they’re not only crew members, they’re also plumbers, janitors and housekeepers. Just last week, in fact, the team of six astronauts currently on board began a month-long chore that requires taking their trash

Astrobiologists have sent 18 different strains of bacteria up to the International Space Station. They’re not meant to contaminate the already-kinda-gross orbital research center, but rather to determine whether the mineral-leaching microbes could help astronauts mine space rocks during future missions, Space.com reports. If the so-called BioRock experiment pans out, the researchers behind the experiment

The most comprehensive and widely-held theory of how the Moon formed is called the ‘giant impact hypothesis.’ That hypothesis states that about 150 million years after the Solar System formed, a roughly Mars-sized planet named Theia collided with Earth. Though the timeline is hotly-debated in the scientific community, we know that this collision melted Theia

A star with an interrupted death sequence could be the progenitor of a type of star that’s totally new to science. Astronomers have just discovered type of very small, very hot star that brightens and dims every few minutes as its outer layers try to maintain equilibrium. The stars have been named hot subdwarf pulsators, and they

An international team of astronomers has found a distant exoplanet that’s being deformed into the shape of a football by the brutal gravitational pull of its host star. “This planet is a prototype for ultra-hot Jupiters,” said Drake Deming, astronomy professor at the University of Maryland and co-author of a paper about the bizarre planet

Despite the classic images we can all imagine, the Milky Way isn’t quite the flat disc shape we thought it was: a study published in February showed evidence of serious warping around the galaxy’s edges, and now a second study has backed up the idea of a twisted Milky Way. A team from the University

Just 31 light-years away, one of the closest worlds ever detected could harbour liquid water on its surface. NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS – a super-powerful orbiting telescope that scouts the sky for alien worlds – spotted a new planet circling a nearby star in the Hydra constellation. When astronomers checked the star

Back in 1976, the late Carl Sagan sat down on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson to talk about a new form of space propulsion called solar sailing. Four decades later, and The Planetary Society has officially demonstrated this “tremendously exciting prospect” in practice. Drawing on ten years of hard work and 7 million dollars

Astronomers have discovered a new main sequence star that’s the fastest of its kind ever found in the Milky Way. It’s hurtling through the galaxy at an eye-popping speed of around 1,700 kilometres per second, and it’s racing away from the centre of the galaxy. This also makes it the first star that astronomers can

The Planetary Society has been busy recently. On June 25, its LightSail 2 launched into orbit; just last week on July 24, the craft opened its sails successfully, a key stage of its mission to demonstrate solar sailing in practice. And now, the nonprofit foundation has released a statement, revealing that tomorrow (July 31), there is

The spinning ball of plasma that is our Sun produces a spinning magnetic field too, and where that magnetic field weakens, solar winds can escape. Now scientists have been able to recreate those same effects in a lab for the first time, meaning we can study the bizarre science around our star at close quarters,

We may have discovered thousands of exoplanets, but few have astronomers as excited as a newly discovered system located just 73 light-years away. It could not only tell us about planet formation, it could lead us to the discovery of a habitable world. Around an unusually quiet red dwarf 73 light-years away, the planet-hunting TESS

When Japanese probe Hayabusa2 touched down on asteroid Ryugu on 11 July 2019, its camera was not sitting idle. The entire event was photographed using its small monitor cam (CAM-H). Now JAXA has compiled those images into an animation, showing the probe closing in to collect mineral samples, then bouncing back off again to resume

Locals at the southern tip of Texas took in an otherworldly sight on Thursday night: A giant mirror-polished machine roared to life near a beach, and through a billowing cloud of orange-coloured smoke, rose six stories into the sky, hovered, and then gently landed. Though the launch lasted less than a minute, the late-night spectacle

In the northern constellation of Ursa Minor, a star is dying. It’s not going quietly, either. It’s wracked by ‘coughs’ that send shockwaves expelling its outer material into the space around it. And this is giving us a glimpse of what’s going to happen to our own Sun, in just a few billion years. The star

The International Space Station (ISS) is the single biggest spacecraft ever built, and one of the most sophisticated machines put in orbit by human kind. Against the fiery backdrop of our Sun, however, the achievement – roughly the size of a football field – looks decidedly puny. A dazzling picture, taken in broad daylight by photographer

A 100-metre-wide (328-feet-wide) asteroid passed just 70,000 kilometers from Earth on Thursday, Australian time. It was discovered by the Brazilian SONEAR survey just days ago, and its presence was announced mere hours before it zoomed past our planet. The lack of warning shows how quickly potentially dangerous asteroids can sneak up on us. The asteroid,

The waxing and waning of sunspots forms part of our Sun’s natural cycle, but it’s a phenomenon astronomers still don’t fully understand. Now, new research has revealed that particular “terminator” events are what brings sunspot cycles to an end, and it means we could get better at predicting them. That would be rather useful, too.

Another test of a star orbiting our galaxy’s supermassive black hole at insane speeds has once again upheld the theory of general relativity as described by Albert Einstein in 1915. As it hurtled around the black hole on its closest approach, the light of a star named S2 was stretched out by the intense gravitational

Our Sun is a lone wolf of a star, but out there in the wider Universe, stars are often locked in a dance with others, orbiting a mutual centre of gravity. In one such triple-star system, astronomers have just found an exoplanet. It has the rather catchy name LTT 1445Ab, as it orbits the primary

LightSail 2 has successfully deployed its solar sails. Shortly after 12:00 pm PST (19:00 UTC) The Planetary Society tweeted that the sails were deployed, and that the spacecraft was sailing with sunlight. We can all enjoy their success and start to wonder how solar sails will fit into humanity’s plans for space exploration. SAIL DEPLOYMENT

Just 7,800 light-years from Earth, two dead stars have been discovered orbiting each other at record-breaking speeds. So close is their orbit, that astronomers expect to detect gravitational waves from this pair in a matter of years, when we turn on more sensitive tools. We’re used to things on cosmic scales happening pretty slowly, but

As far back as our collective memory extends, we’ve been mesmerised by the dance of the planets across our skies. Even now, despite all our knowledge and technology, their basic movements can still surprise and captivate us. The waltz between Earth and Venus around the Sun has been doing just that, for centuries – and

A team of researchers at the University of California says that there could be way more ice water on the surface of the Moon than previously believed – and that could be a huge deal for future missions to the Moon. By comparing shaded areas that are protected from the Sun on the surface of

Our planet is part of the larger structure of the Solar System, shaped and made stable by the force of gravity. Our Solar System is gravitationally bound to the Milky Way galaxy, along with hundreds of millions of other solar systems. And our galaxy is also part of a larger structure, where not only gravity,

Varunavi Sreejith, 13, gaped at the screen in front of her, inching to the edge of her seat as the clock ticked down to 2:43 p.m. When Chandrayaan-2, India’s second lunar mission, took off, she jumped up, clapping, a bright smile lighting up her face. “I am very proud and relieved,” Varunavi said. A student

LightSail 2, the brainchild of The Planetary Society, has gifted us two new gorgeous images of Earth. The small spacecraft is currently in orbit at about 720 km, and the LightSail 2 mission team is putting it through its paces in preparation for solar sail deployment sometime on or after Sunday, July 21st. LightSail 2

On Friday, the Chinese space station Tiangong-2 was spectacularly decommissioned — it was set on a crash course with a remote patch of the Pacific Ocean called the “Spacecraft Cemetery.” Tiangong-2 is no more, but we can re-live its final moments. The state-owned China Global Television Network posted a YouTube video of the space station

SpaceX filled the South Texas air with the roar of a Raptor engine on Tuesday night. However, Elon Musk’s rocket company also set off a fireball that briefly engulfed the rocket ship that the engine was attached to. The rocket, called Starhopper, is a squat, six-story prototype of a larger interplanetary launch system known as

Even though we can see the Moon shining brightly in the night sky – and sometimes in daylight – it’s hard to put into perspective just how large, and just how distant, our nearest neighbour actually is. So just how big is the Moon? That answer isn’t quite as straightforward as you might think. Like

Strange voids out there in space – pockets of near nothingness between galaxies – could be crucial in measuring the expansion of the Universe with greater precision than we’ve ever managed before, new research says. Experts have been able to use a new method to accurately measure the distortion caused by Doppler shifts on the

An orbit has now been decided for the first permanent lunar outpost. When the lunar Gateway space station gets into position around the Moon, it will be in a highly eccentric “halo” orbit, perpendicular to Earth. This particular type of orbit is called a near rectilinear halo orbit (NRHO). It helps minimise the use of

It’s all about the detail. In a way, Mars looks like a dusty, dead, dry, boring planet. But science says otherwise. Science says that Mars used to be wet and warm, with an atmosphere. And science says that it was wet and warm for billions of years, easily long enough for life to appear and

Exhale. We are safe from the asteroid that scary headlines were warning us about in early June, according to new observations from the European Space Agency and the European Southern Observatory. The space rock is called 2006 QV89. It’s around 20 to 50 metres (65 to 164 feet) across, and its orbit around the Sun

Stars aren’t supposed to come back to life after the death throes of the supernova stage, but astronomers have spotted three that have done just that – surviving the catastrophic explosion that usually marks the end of a star’s life, and heading off through the galaxy on a new adventure. These peculiar ‘zombie’ stars move

When astronauts first saw Earth from afar in the Apollo 8 mission in 1968 – the US’s second manned mission to the Moon – they described a cognitive shift in awareness after seeing our planet “hanging in the void.” This state of mental clarity, called the “overview effect”, occurs when you are flung so far

There may be fundamental flaws with our understanding of the Universe. The problem came to light as scientists tried to calculate and measure a value called the Hubble Constant, which represents how rapidly the Universe is expanding outward. The value was first calculated by astronomer Edwin Hubble in the 1920s. But since then, astronomers observing

SpaceX thinks it may know what caused its new Crew Dragon spaceship to explode during a test on April 20. The capsule-like ship is designed to ferry NASA astronauts to and from the International Space Station, but it first has to pass a series of major tests. In April, SpaceX conducted an uncrewed ground test

The plot has thickened on a huge discovery from earlier this year that appeared to prove the existence of seemingly ‘impossible’ long-lived galaxies – ones without any dark matter. According to new distance calculations, the galaxy in question is much closer than initial measurements suggested. This changes both the mass of the galaxy as a

India called off the launch of its much-awaited second lunar mission shortly before liftoff Monday, citing a technical snag, in a setback for the country’s growing ambitions in space. The countdown clock for the Chandrayaan-2 mission – which had been due to blast off from the country’s east coast at 2:51 am – was halted

Should everything go according to plan, more than 1.1 million strangers will gather in a remote Nevada town in mid-September, united by a common goal: to raid Area 51 in the wee hours of the morning — using a strength-in-numbers approach to reveal any extraterrestrial treasures stashed within the notoriously clandestine government base. Or, put

Once upon a time, the great planet Jupiter was orbited by a glorious ring of dust, according to astronomers. Now, nothing of it remains, having coalesced long ago into the planet’s Galilean moons. But these moon-forming discs should be found around other planets in alien star systems. And for the first time we have confirmation

While our warming atmosphere on Earth threatens many living things, spurring on global warming on Mars could be the key to making the planet habitable for Earthly life. And scientists think they may have identified a material that can help turn up the thermostat for parts of the Red Planet. “Mars is the most habitable

If all goes to plan, in November this year the International Space Station (ISS) is about to get a bit spicier. Researchers are hoping to send up Española chili pepper plants (Capsicum annuum), which could make peppers the very first fruit to be grown in space by US astronauts. “We were also looking for varieties