Space news stories

A colossal structure in the distant Universe is defying our understanding of how the Universe evolved. In light that has traveled for 6.9 billion years to reach us, astronomers have found a giant, almost perfect ring of galaxies, some 1.3 billion light-years in diameter. It doesn’t match any known structure or formation mechanism.

Is Stonehenge aligned with the moon? Scientists hope to find out during a rare ‘major lunar standstill, which happens once every 18.6 years.

The great planetary instability, which saw Jupiter and the other gas giants wander chaotically through the solar system, coincides with the collision that formed Earth’s moon. Could the two events be linked?

The hunt for the elusive Planet Nine goes on, and new research claims to have the “strongest statistical evidence yet” that there is such a planet orbiting somewhere around the far edges of the Solar System.

Scientists have identified one of the oldest known stars outside the Milky Way. The discovery, reported in March in the journal Nature Astronomy, has uncovered a relic from the early days of the universe in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way — and it’s revealing the conditions from a time before the sun even existed.

A small international team of planetary scientists has found evidence supporting the theory that the near-Earth asteroid Kamo’oalewa is ejecta from the moon. In their paper published in the journal Nature Astronomy, the group describes their data-driven models and what they revealed.

Ceres, the largest asteroid in our solar system, harbors a dark secret: extremely young ice deposits in permanently shadowed craters near its poles. If that sounds vaguely familiar, it’s because our moon and planet Mercury also have such polar ice deposits, which have been studied for decades. See the study here.

The rising and setting of the sun at Stonehenge, especially during the summer and winter solstices, continues to evoke joy, fascination and religious devotion. Now a project has been launched to delve into the lesser understood links that may exist between the monument and the moon during a rare lunar event.

The moment the sun went behind the moon, the snapping turtles all simultaneously slipped into the waters of Lake Tawakoni. Twilight painted the world. Clouds raced across the sky. Just beside the moon-covered sun sat bright Jupiter, shining in the middle of the day. Most birds and insects had grown hushed or gone completely silent.

The Moon is a great whackin’ oddball in the sky, and scientists may have just figured out part of the reason why. Its surface is chemically asymmetrical, and new evidence suggests that’s because the Moon’s mantle flipped topsy-turvy upside-down when the Moon was only young. What was on top of Earth’s satellite went underneath; what was below came out into the light.

These particles are like celestial time capsules, providing a snapshot into the life of their parent star,” says Dr Nicole Nevill, lead author of a study published today in the Astrophysical Journal.

The Hubble Space Telescope has imaged a powerful jet erupting from a natal envelope of gas and dust that represents a newly born star announcing itself to the cosmos.

This year, the March equinox takes place on 20 March at 03:06 GMT. This means that in certain westward time zones, the equinox will actually fall on 19 March local time.

Sound waves fossilized in the maps of galaxies across the Universe could be interpreted as signs of a Big Bang that took place 13 billion years earlier than current models suggest. This research was published in The Astrophysical Journal.

The debate occurred at a packed session featuring Hairuo Fu, a graduate student at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who is a member of the team that found the fragments…Many scientists have said they don’t want to spend much time analysing and refuting these claims.

A comet that is larger than Mount Everest could become visible to the naked eye in the coming weeks as it continues its first visit to the inner solar system in more than 70 years, say astronomers.