Space

As we gain greater ability to peer deeper and deeper into the Universe, we’ve been finding something very surprising: Supermassive black holes millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun, before the Universe was even 10 percent of its current age. This is quite the cosmological conundrum. Given what we know about the

The Universe is a large place, and there are a lot of large things in it. Not just galaxies, but groupings of galaxies, and the cosmic web that connects them all together. Scientists have just discovered what appears to be one of these groupings, and it could have serious implications for our understanding of the

The first astronauts arrived at China’s new space station on Thursday in the country’s longest crewed mission to date, a landmark step in establishing Beijing as a major space power. The trio blasted off on a Long March-2F rocket from the Jiuquan launch centre in northwest China’s Gobi desert, and their craft docked around seven

In the far reaches of the Universe, a supermassive black hole is throwing a tantrum. It’s blowing a tremendous wind into intergalactic space, and we’re seeing the storm light from 13.1 billion years ago, when the Universe was less than 10 percent of its current age. It’s the most distant such tempest we’ve ever identified,

Speculation has been rife about the contents of an unclassified report set to be released later this month from the Pentagon’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) task force. The document, expected to drop on June 25, will supposedly provide a comprehensive summary of what the US government knows about UAPs – or, to use the more popular

It’s official: Betelgeuse sneezed and caught a cold. The cause of the star’s mysterious drop in brightness was caused by a giant cloud of dust, ejected from the red supergiant – but it could only do so because the star’s changing temperature allowed it. Betelgeuse’s Great Dimming, as the event has come to be known,

Although the night sky changes very little on human timescales, the Universe is not a static place. We wheel about in motion around the galactic center. Stars are born, and die in violent explosions. Galaxies collide. And, for the first time, astronomers have just found evidence that some of the largest structures in the cosmos

We now have a three-dimensional map of one of the boundaries of the Solar System. For the first time, astronomers have been able to determine the shape of the heliosphere, the boundary that marks the end of the influence of our star’s solar wind. This discovery could help us better understand the environment of the

Rocket launches are noisy affairs, for sure, but the sounds they produce aren’t all audible to the human ear. As rockets leave Earth they generate infrasound, low-frequency sound waves that need special instruments to detect. And scientists have indeed been detecting them. A new study details infrasounds from 1,001 rocket launches, including Space Shuttles, Falcon

It’s hard to tell what’s lurking out there, in the dark voids between the stars. Evidence, however, suggests the existence of a vast population of rogue exoplanets, set adrift and tethered to no star. Far from the live-giving warmth a star provides, these lonely exoplanets are unlikely to be habitable. Their moons might be another

Healthy “space pups” were born from freeze-dried mouse sperm that orbited the planet for nearly six years aboard the International Space Station (ISS), according to a new study.  That’s good news because DNA-damaging radiation on the ISS is more than 100 times stronger than on Earth. Beyond the ISS, which is still shielded from some radiation by our

They are the hot-headed tyrants that drive the evolution of the cosmos. Black holes so large, so powerful, the energy spilled from their swirling cloaks can define the landscape of nurseries and graveyards of stars in the galaxy surrounding them. Even with masses equal to billions of suns, these gargantuan objects are still mere pinpricks in the

There’s something strange near the galactic center. Some 25,000 light-years from Earth, astronomers have found a weird star that almost blinked out of existence for several months before reappearing. Astronomers believe the star, named VVV-WIT-08, could belong to a new class of star – giant beasts over 100 times the Sun that are eclipsed by

Astronomy enthusiasts rose in the early-morning hours to capture a rare glimpse at a solar eclipse. Those in the northern US as well as Canada and Greenland got the best shots of the “ring of fire” eclipse that took place Thursday morning, though the eclipse was only partial for most of the Northern Hemisphere. A sliver

The rain of meteorites from space onto our planet over the last 500 million years may not have fallen in quite the way we thought. After analyzing 8,484 kilograms (18,704 pounds) of sedimentary rock from ancient seabeds, scientists have found that major collisions in the asteroid belt have not made any significant contribution to the

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos announced plans on Monday to fly into space next month on a rocket built by his company Blue Origin, fulfilling what he said was a lifelong dream. The 57-year-old billionaire said he and his brother Mark will blast off from Earth on July 20 on the first crewed flight of the

The Moon will blot out part of the Sun during the “ring of fire” solar eclipse on Thursday (June 10) morning. But, no one should simply gaze upward at a solar eclipse (unless the Sun is completely covered by the Moon during totality, which is NOT happening this time). So, what’s a skygazer to do? Depending on where you

In just its first year of operations, a Canadian radio telescope has quadrupled the number of detections of strange cosmic signals known as extragalactic fast radio bursts. Between 2018 and 2019, the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) detected 535 new signals. The new, expanded fast radio burst (FRB) catalog will allow scientists to better

Grey, heavily cratered, and peering out from the black of space, Ganymede looks a lot like our moon. But the icy rock is more than 650 million kilometers (400 million miles) away – it’s the largest moon in the Solar System, and it circles Jupiter. NASA’s Juno spacecraft has been rocketing around Jupiter since 2016,

Squinting through their telescopes at the twinkling heavens, few 19th century astronomers would have imagined the cosmic wonders awaiting discovery in the century to come.  Stars so dense, a teaspoon of their matter would weigh as much as a mountain. Objects so compact, literally nothing could escape its gravity. Even galaxies had yet to be

One of the most breathtakingly beautiful sights our skies can muster is the dancing glow of auroral lights. Yet this fascinating phenomenon is still not fully understood. We know it’s produced by particles blown in from solar storms, accelerated along Earth’s magnetic field lines to the higher latitudes, where they rain down into the upper

NASA has selected two missions, dubbed DAVINCI+ and VERITAS, to study the “lost habitable” world of Venus. Each mission will receive approximately US$500 million for development and both are expected to launch between 2028 and 2030. It had long been thought there was no life on Venus, due to its extremely high temperatures. But late

A new discovery could soon be raising the total number of confirmed magnetars to 25. On 3 June, a brief X-ray burst close to the galactic plane caught the attention of the Swift Burst Alert Telescope (BAT). Follow-up observation and analysis seem to confirm that it was emitted by a previously unknown magnetar, now named

A huge cluster of stars has been found lurking in the Milky Way, just a relatively short cosmic distance from our own Solar System. Now around 75 million years old, the open cluster Valparaíso 1 is estimated to have contained around 10,000 solar masses’ worth of stars when it first blazed into existence. At just 7,000

NASA announced two new missions to Venus on Wednesday that will launch at the end of the decade and are aimed at learning how Earth’s nearest planetary neighbor became a hellscape while our own thrived. “These two sister missions both aim to understand how Venus became an inferno-like world, capable of melting lead at the surface,”

A newly discovered repeating fast radio burst (FRB) named FRB 20200120E is deepening the mystery of these already deeply mysterious space signals. Astronomers have tracked its location to a galaxy 11.7 million light-years away, which makes it the closest known fast radio burst, 40 times closer than the next-closest extragalactic signal. But it also appears

The shimmering appearance of frosty, white clouds in the atmosphere of Mars has surprised NASA scientists, with the wispy formations emerging in unexpected ways. Clouds are a rarer weather phenomenon on Mars as compared to Earth, thanks to the red planet’s thin, dry atmosphere, but they’re certainly not unheard of. Still, a number of unusual

The popular conception goes that nothing can escape from a black hole. Once something passes the event horizon – the so-called point of no return – it stays there, forever, bound by a gravitational field not even light can escape. But a rotating black hole generates vast amounts of energy, which, theoretically, can be extracted

The inevitable has occurred. A piece of space debris too small to be tracked has hit and damaged part of the International Space Station – namely, the Canadarm2 robotic arm. The instrument is still operational, but the object punctured the thermal blanket and damaged the boom beneath. It’s a sobering reminder that the low-Earth orbit’s

Astronomers have created the most comprehensive map yet of all the dark matter in the universe. That’s no easy feat, considering dark matter is invisible. Scientists know this shadowy cousin of regular matter exists, though, because its strong gravitational forces can pull entire galaxies together. Based on observations of its influence, astronomers estimate that dark

A new map of dark matter made using artificial intelligence reveals hidden filaments of the invisible stuff bridging galaxies. The map focuses on the local universe — the neighborhood surrounding the Milky Way. Despite being close by, the local universe is difficult to map because it’s chock full of complex structures made of visible matter,

The center of the Milky Way is a strange and wild place. There dwells our galactic nucleus – a supermassive black hole 4 million times the mass of the Sun, a beast named Sgr A*. It’s probably the most extreme environment in our galaxy, dominated by Sgr A*’s gravitational and magnetic fields. It’s also very

During its sixth flight on the red planet, the Ingenuity helicopter experienced a little mishap – but, thanks to planning and built-in failsafes, it survived to fly another day. This is actually great news, because it demonstrates the multiple ways in which the vehicle is robust to errors – as well as giving engineers here

NASA is preparing to rocket around 5,000 tardigrades – those adorably pudgy ‘water bears’ – and 128 glow-in-the-dark baby squid into space. The animals are heading to the International Space Station (ISS) next week as part of SpaceX’s 22nd cargo resupply mission. SpaceX is set to launch the microscopic critters onboard a Falcon 9 rocket

Jupiter’s ice-encrusted moon Europa is increasingly looking like the best place in the Solar System to search for extraterrestrial life. New modeling suggests that the rocky mantle, deep below the thick ice and salty ocean, could actually be hot enough for volcanic activity. Moreover, it could have been this hot over most of its 4.5-billion

A “super blood moon” appeared in the sky early on Wednesday, but only certain parts of the world caught a glimpse. Thanks to a total lunar eclipse, the Moon took on a reddish hue around 7:14 a.m. ET in parts of North America, South America, Asia, and Oceania. The event coincided with a supermoon –

Russia is planning to send a nuclear-powered spacecraft to the Moon, then Venus, then Jupiter. Roscosmos, Russia’s federal space agency, announced Saturday that its “space tug” – the term for a spacecraft that transports astronauts or equipment from one orbit to another – is scheduled to launch on an interplanetary mission in 2030. The spacecraft’s energy module,

New calculations from bored physicists have just brought us a bit closer to understanding how material can fall onto neutron stars to flare out powerful blasts of X-ray light. If enough plasma is gravitationally attracted to the dead star from a binary companion, its mass is sufficient to force a way through the barrier created

The Red Planet, called that for its rusty oxidized soil, looks vastly different to our planet’s green and blue appearance. Well, at least usually. The two planets can also appear incredibly similar, as European Space Agency astronaut Thomas Pesquet discovered while taking a photo of Earth looking decidedly red earlier this month, while onboard the

The first lunar eclipse of 2021 is going to happen during the early hours of May 26. But this is going to be an especially super lunar event, as it will be a supermoon, a lunar eclipse and a red blood moon all at once. So what does this all mean? What’s a super moon?

Ever since the Gaia satellite began mapping the Milky Way in three dimensions with the highest precision yet, we’ve been learning a lot about our home galaxy’s violent past. The scrappy cannibal has collided with, and subsumed, multiple other galaxies over its 13.6-billion year lifespan. The largest of these, the Gaia-Enceladus dwarf galaxy (AKA the

The mystery of fast radio bursts (FRBs) continues to fascinate astronomers. No one is quite sure what’s behind these super-short, super-intense radio wave pulses from deep space, but now astronomers have tracked down five FRBs to their home galaxies. It’s the Hubble Space Telescope that has come up with the goods again. The ultraviolet and

Scientists have captured a picture of the oldest known spiral galaxy, which was formed 12.4 billion years ago. The galaxy, officially named BRI 1335-0417, was snapped by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope in Chile.  It shows that spiral galaxies were formed as early as 1.4 billion years after the Big Bang. The photo was taken

We sort-of take it for granted that there’s a supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, but we can’t really go there and check. What if something else is actually lurking in this messy, dusty region? We partially infer the presence and properties of a supermassive hole called Sagittarius A* (Sgr

Solar panels against an alien landscape, ramps and rods pointing at the Martian horizon – China’s first probe on the Red Planet has beamed back its first “selfies” after its history-making landing last week. The Zhurong rover was carried into the Martian atmosphere in a lander on Saturday, in the first ever successful probe landing

The birth of a star is a wild and magnificent thing. It’s also momentous, taking place over millions of years, in dense, cold clouds of molecular gas and dust, where clusters of stars form together. It’s not a process we’re likely ever going to be able to observe from start to finish – but an

The Sun is constantly bubbling and bursting. If eruptions on its surface are big enough, they can send billions of tons of plasma and electrically charged particles hurtling toward Earth. To observe and study those kinds of explosions – called coronal mass ejections – NASA and the European Space Agency launched the Solar Orbiter probe in February 2020.

Well over 4,000 exoplanets orbiting other stars in the Milky Way have been identified and confirmed to date. From that population, a curious pattern has emerged: there are extremely few exoplanets between 1.5 and 2 times the size of Earth orbiting close to their stars, a phenomenon known as the small planet radius gap. Where