When it comes to finding life outside of Earth, it’s hard to know where to look. The dark and icy oceans of Enceladus and Europa offer one kind of hypothetical habitat. Meanwhile, the dusty, arid landscape of Mars looks to be almost the opposite – but scientists have just found a clue that gives hope

Remember when the Solar System was simple? When you learned to say My Very Easy Method Just Sped Up Naming Planets? Astronomers just had to go mess it up, didn’t they. Now our Solar System is littered with dwarf planets and comets masquerading as asteroids and ridiculous sounding ‘moon moons‘ and we can’t deal. Thankfully the

There’s a lot of junk in Earth’s orbit we don’t tend to see in our skies; a lot of that space debris is pretty small, but there are some bigger pieces. As they lose altitude, we can expect to see them again – and one could be coming rather soon. That piece of junk is Kosmos 482, a

Once again, scientists have scrutinised one of the strangest stars in the sky to understand its wild light fluctuations. The latest observations of KIC 8462852, also known as Tabby’s star or Boyajian’s star, have scanned for the kind of laser emission that could be produced by a civilisation. Well, guess what. It’s been three-and-a-half years

Over four billion years ago, when Earth was turbulent and new, a strange spark of life grew into existence. We’re not entirely sure how it happened, but evidence suggests it was deep under the sea, far below the reach of the Sun’s rays. If we can figure out how that spark formed, it could help

Japan’s space agency pulled off something awesome this week. Its spacecraft Hayabusa2 touched down on asteroid Ryugu, collected a sample, and jumped off again. To remember this, we now have an epic photo of Ryugu’s surface, potentially showing marks of that historic encounter. Hayabusa2 actually arrived at Ryugu in June of last year, and dropped

Billions of years ago, Mars was likely a much warmer and wetter place than the cold, dry, barren world we see today. Whether there was life there or not remains an open question. But there’s a massive, growing wall of evidence showing that Mars may have had the necessary conditions for life in the past,

At a staggering distance from the Sun, astronomers have just found what they think might be the most distant object ever identified in the Solar System. They’ve yet to characterise or define it, but it orbits the Sun at a massive distance of 140 astronomical units (AU), which puts it 3.5 times farther out than

Back in January, the New Horizons spacecraft zoomed past the furthest object we’ve ever explored - Ultima Thule. But before that, the team back on Earth managed to snap a few perfect pictures of the weirdly shaped Kuiper belt object. The most detailed of those photos has just been released by the team.  “Bullseye!” said New

NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover, which touched down in 2014, experienced a “hiccup” while booting up last week – but scientists on Earth have brought it back online and are working to reconstruct what went wrong. “We’re still not sure of its exact cause and are gathering the relevant data for analysis,” said Steven Lee, Curiosity’s

Richard Branson’s company Virgin Galactic has flown its first passenger on a rocket-powered spaceship. The flight is part of a decades-long effort by multiple companies to usher in an era of frequent and safe suborbital space tourism, in which vehicles can fly high enough to briefly enter space, provide minutes of zero gravity, then return to

We humans like to put labels and boundaries on things. For example, the boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and space is the Kármán line, the point at 100 kilometres (62 miles) altitude where aeronautics end, and astronautics take over. But Earth’s atmosphere is way more complicated than that (there’s even some debate about where the Kármán

Over the past few months, Elon Musk has been revealing new details about SpaceX’s upcoming launch system, called Starship. Musk has said the new launch vehicle, which he and engineers recently redesigned, will eventually replace all the company’s rockets. It will be fully reusable and extremely cheap to launch, the thinking goes – perhaps reducing

A new optical instrument that can detect plant-based organisms from kilometres away due to the unique way living things reflect light could one day help in the search for life beyond this planet, new research suggests. The working prototype device – called the TreePol spectropolarimeter – is the result of years of research by Dutch

Neptune, it seems, has been keeping a few secrets. A teeny tiny moon has been found in orbit around the enigmatic outermost known planet – previously undetected, even though it’s right here in our Solar System. It’s been named Hippocamp, after the half-fish, half-horse of Greek mythology (in keeping with Neptune’s sea theme), and it’s

The Universe just got a little more crowded with the discovery of more than 300,000 potential galaxies in a tiny corner of the northern sky. A release of data gathered by the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) telescope network in Europe has added extraordinary new levels of detail to the map of radio waves across the

You’re not hallucinating: Yes, the Moon looks brighter than normal, and yes, it looks bigger too. But Tuesday evening will bring the real show: what astronomers at NASA call a “perigean” moon, or “supermoon”. The event will coincide with a full moon that’s often referred to as a “snow moon” or “hunger moon”. It’s not

If you live in the Southern Hemisphere, next time you get the opportunity, go outside and look at the night sky. Most of that celestial plain is covered in a star cluster that’s been torn apart by galactic tidal forces, and is now flowing past us as a giant river of over 4,000 stars. Although

Sirius, a double-star system and the brightest object in the night sky, will briefly blink out of existence for parts of Earth on Monday evening. In an event called an occultation – when one object in space blocks the light of another behind it – a small asteroid known as (4388) Jürgenstock will slip in front of the

SpaceX, the aerospace company founded by Elon Musk, is working diligently on a wildly ambitious project: to permanently settle people on Mars. To help make that vision a reality, Musk’s company is developing a colossal, fully reusable launch system called Starship. Starship is envisioned as a 180-foot-tall spaceship that will ride into orbit atop Super Heavy, a

Long-duration spaceflight does weird things to the human body, even at the molecular level, but so far there’s no reason to think humans couldn’t survive a two-and-a-half-year round-trip journey to Mars. That was the bottom-line message Friday from a NASA official and two scientists as they revealed more results from the agency’s “Twins Study,” which

Our Sun can let out some solar flare rip-snorters from time to time, but it’s actually pretty quiet when compared to some other stars out there. Particularly, it seems, turbulent young stars. And astronomers have just caught one belching out a real corker. It’s called JW 566, a young star about 389 parsecs (1,269 light-years)

Astronomers have known for some time that the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxies will collide on some future date. The best guess for that rendezvous has been about 3.75 billion years from now. But now a new study based on Data Release 2 from the ESA’s Gaia mission is bringing some clarity to this

An invisible force is having an effect on our Universe. We can’t see it, and we can’t detect it – but we can observe how it interacts gravitationally with the things we can see and detect, such as light. Now an international team of astronomers has used one of the world’s most powerful telescopes to

A new study shows that Mars may very well be volcanically active. Nobody’s seen direct evidence of volcanism; no eruptions or magma or anything like that. Rather, the proof is in the water. In the past, Mars was a much warmer and wetter place. Now, Mars is still home to lots of water, mostly as

Rolling up to the crater’s edge, the Opportunity rover took in a landscape unlike anything any Earthling had ever seen. A vast, meteorite-blasted expanse of volcanic rock and iron oxide extended for 15 miles, ringed by rugged mountains under a dusky orange sky. In months to come, the enterprising robot would uncover signs that warm,

Earth is getting a special celestial visitor this week in the shape of comet C/2018 Y1 Iwamoto – this sparkling, green-hued hunk of ice and minerals is already visible in the night sky through telescopes and even binoculars. It’s the first binocular comet of 2019 – which means a comet that’s visible from Earth through

Universities in the US have long wrangled over who owns the world’s largest drum. Unsubstantiated claims to the title have included the “Purdue Big Bass Drum” and “Big Bertha“, which interestingly was named after the German World War I cannon and ended up becoming radioactive during the Manhattan Project. Unfortunately for the Americans, however, the

Remember Mars One, the startup that said it was going to fund a crewed mission to Mars by turning the journey into a reality television spectacle? Now the company is bankrupt, according to financial documents published online. Engadget confirmed the bankruptcy with Mars One co-founder Bas Lansdorp, who told the publication that he was working

The most distant object our species has ever visited, a space rock called 2014 MU69, is less snowman-shaped than scientists previously thought. NASA flew its New Horizons probe by the rock, which is nicknamed Ultima Thule and located 4 billion miles from Earth, on New Year’s Day. New Horizons flew within 2,200 miles of MU69,

We’ve seen 3D printed rockets before, but never on this scale. UK space startup Orbex just showed off its Prime Rocket’s gigantic second stage — the “world’s largest 3D printed rocket engine,” according to a press release. The entire rocket, including the engine, will stand at 56 feet (17 meters) tall — roughly a quarter

We’ve been gazing out at the Solar System for a very long time, and by now we know, more or less, where things go. Sun, planets, asteroid belt, more planets, then millions more asteroids (we’re not really sure how many). Maybe another planet. OK, so it’s a little tricky. But a new discovery has hinted

There’s no two-ways about it, the Universe is an extremely big place! And thanks to the limitations placed upon us by Special Relativity, traveling to even the closest star systems could take millennia. As we addressed in a previous article, the estimated travel time to the nearest star system (Alpha Centauri) could take anywhere from

In 2021, Rosalind Franklin will set down on the rust-stained sands of Mars before setting off in hunt for chemical building blocks that could indicate the presence of life. The new name of the European Space Agency (ESA) ExoMars rover was selected to honour a British chemist who contributed to the discovery of DNA’s helical

Astronomers have been treated to a truly special look at some of the organic building blocks of the Universe, thanks to a newborn star that’s been spotted around 1,300 light-years away from Earth. That star is V883 Ori - as it grows, the bursting heat is pushing back the star’s ‘snow line’ – that’s the area around the

We’ve seen it before, but never this clearly. For the first time, China’s Longjiang-2 satellite photographed the entirety of the Moon’s far side and the Earth in a single shot, Popular Mechanics reports. The 16 kilobyte image was downloaded by the Dutch Dwingeloo Radio Telescope over the course of about 20 minutes. We already received

A month after China pulled off its historic Chang’e 4 mission, which landed robots on the moon’s far side for the first time, NASA has released an image further proving the feat was a success. NASA photographed the Chinese landing site on January 30 with a moon-circling spacecraft called the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Researchers published

On 30 October 2018 Kepler, NASA’s planet-hunting space telescope, sent its last signal. It had been on the ropes for years due to failing reaction wheels, but engineers had managed to keep it operational. Then, last year, it finally ran out of fuel. Its mission had originally been planned for a duration 3.5 years. The

For Elon Musk and SpaceX, the company he founded to reignite space exploration, a great deal hinges on the creation of the Starship. This super-heavy launch vehicle, which was has evolved considerably in the past few years, will eventually replace the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy as the mainstay of the SpaceX fleet. Once operational,

Russian news agency RIA Novosti revealed images last week of a hypersonic uncrewed spacecraft reportedly in development by the country’s space agency. The aircraft will be outfitted with a single Briz-M upper stage engine – a Russian space rocket that’s been in use since 2000 – and is designed to fly at altitudes of up to

Some of the most spectacular pictures of deep space are of nebulae – gorgeously coloured clouds of dust and gas glowing from within. They look peaceful and serene, but in actuality, they’re scenes of violence. Usually, nebulae are either the lingering ghosts of exploded stars, or stellar nurseries – regions where stars are being born

It sounds like something out of a sci-fi movie, but it’s a wild possibility scientists are actually exploring: how to fit a space station inside an asteroid. Why would we attempt such a bizarre feat of astro-engineering? Because the spin of the asteroid would create enough gravity for mining equipment to be effectively used, giving

Apparently our galaxy really likes to boogie. It has, on several occasions, enjoyed a Monster Mash; now it’s been caught doing the Twist. A new study has revealed that the Milky Way isn’t a nice, neat, flat disc – it’s seriously warped around the edges. We often compare our home galaxy to our next-door neighbour,

Since it was first detected hurling through our Solar System, the interstellar object known as ‘Oumuamua has been a source of immense scientific interest. Aside from being extrasolar in origin, the fact that it has managed to defy classification time and again has led to some pretty interesting theories. While some have suggested that it

Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission directorate, says it’s likely that there’s life beyond Earth. “Is there life beyond Earth? I think the answer is yes — but we just don’t know,” Zurbuchen said during an interview at Boston University. “The simple reason I think so is because we underestimated nature when we

Humanity is getting pretty good at looking deep into space. We’ve peered back over 13 billion light-years. We’ve seen – actually seen – two neutron stars colliding. We’re homing in on fast radio bursts, and we’re about to see, for the first time, the event horizon of a black hole. But there are still some

Record-smashing cold temperatures have led to a wave of headlines highlighting how parts of the US are now colder than Mars. In parts of media, this is now a near-yearly ritual: The Atlantic had a story on it in 2017, and even NASA’s Curiosity Rover tweeted it a few winters ago. But what does “colder

Curiosity has been puttering away out there on Mars since August 2012, but she still has a few surprises tucked inside her weathered chassis. Scientists have just figured out how to use the rover’s instruments to measure the gravity of the ground it’s been rolling across. In turn, this has allowed scientists for the first