Space news stories

April 29, 2017, a fireball flew over Kyoto, Japan. Compared to other fireballs spotted from Earth, it was relatively bright and slow. Now, scientists have determined not only what the fireball was, but also where it came from.

About 790,000 years ago, a meteor slammed into Earth with such force that the explosion blanketed about 10% of the planet with shiny black lumps of rocky debris.

Andrew McCarthy, who last year dropped jaws with a stunningly clear composite photo of the moon made up of 50,000 exposures, is back with a more colorful take on our closest celestial neighbor.

Scientists recently identified the oldest material on Earth: stardust that’s 7 billion years old, tucked away in a massive, rocky meteorite that struck our planet half a century ago.

A crisis in physics may have just gotten deeper. By looking at how the light from distant bright objects is bent, researchers have increased the discrepancy between different methods for calculating the expansion rate of the universe.

The Virtual Telescope Project’s image of asteroid 2020 AV2 isn’t much of a looker, but the small dot pointed out by an arrow is a big new discovery.

It was once thought that the gas giant Jupiter protected Earth from asteroids and other deadly space objects. But one scientist has warned that the massive planet actually acts as a ‘sniper rather than a shield’.

It was around a few months back that NASA’s chief scientist predicted the possibility of discovering alien life within 2021 on Mars. Now, a scientist has suggested that alien life could be discovered on asteroids.

For the first time, the agency has discovered a roughly Earth-size planet in the habitable zone of its host star researchers announced today (Jan. 6).

Mysterious ultra-fast pinpricks of radio energy keep lighting up the night sky and nobody knows why.

The full moon of January, called the Wolf Moon, will occur on Jan. 10 at 2:21 p.m. EST (1921 GMT), and it will coincide with a lunar eclipse for skywatchers in much of the world.

A team of researchers recently released simulations of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) — a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way — and found that cosmic rays from a starburst event are starting to rip it apart.

A new 3D visualization recreates the biggest stellar explosion observed by humankind — and now you can watch it, too.

Homo sapiens have been treading this planet for around 350,000 years now. With our primate hands and our primate brains, we have expanded our curiosity beyond Earth’s blue skies.

Eager astronomy fans braved the cold over the weekend to get a glimpse of 2020’s first meteor shower.

Space missions of a startling variety and ambition are scheduled for launch this year. Indeed, space engineers have not planned so much activity since the heady days of the space race in the 1960s.