Space news stories

Scientific knowledge, whether about a human species or the planets, is powerful because it is provisional and cumulative.

According to an article published by National Geographic last December, “decades of photometric data show that Betelgeuse brightens and dims in cycles, with one notable cycle vacillating on a roughly six-year time scale and another rising and falling every 425 days or so.”

As the waning crescent moon rises in the small hours of the morning of Tuesday, Feb. 18, skywatchers will be preparing for an unusual event. That morning the moon glides in front of orange, starlike planet Mars for viewers in much of central and eastern North America, in what is known as an occultation.

Alien hunters are scaling up their efforts in the search for an intelligent civilisation somewhere out in the void of space. Experts at the SETI Institute, an organisation dedicated to tracking extraterrestrial intelligence, are developing state-of-the-art techniques to detect signatures from space that indicate the possibility of extraterrestrial existence.

Prisms are fascinating: White light goes in and a rainbow comes out. But for a long time, people assumed that the prism was somehow generating those colors.

It’s red, it’s cold, it’s 4bn years old: Nasa data from Arrokoth reveals ‘profound truths’ about the solar system

ESA’s Planetary Defence team observed the rare moment in which an object escaped our planet’s gravity, in contrast to their normal objects of study—potentially hazardous rocks that could strike it.

Scientists have discovered an asteroid with such a strange surface that they have named it the “golf ball”. The rock is the most heavily cratered object ever to be seen in the asteroid belt and is “like discovering a new world”, according to the researchers who found it. And in addition to the strange holes, it also has a mysterious “bright spot” on its surface.

Nearly 50 years have passed since a human last set foot on the moon. But when team members of NASA’s 1972 Apollo 17 mission packed up for their return trip to Earth, they brought 245 pounds of the lunar ground they walked on back with them—for science, of course.

The majority of stars in the universe will become luminous enough to blast surrounding asteroids into successively smaller fragments using their light alone, according to a University of Warwick astronomer

Scientists have discovered the first fast radio burst that beats at a steady rhythm, and the mysterious repeating signal is coming from the outskirts of another galaxy.

Europe’s audacious Solar Orbiter probe is all set to lift off on its quest to study the Sun from close quarters.

For nearly four years, NASA’s Kepler spacecraft whisked through space, surveying our corner of the galaxy. It monitored more than 150,000 stars, looking for planets about the size of Earth that belonged to other solar systems.

The full moon of February, called the Snow Moon, will occur in the eastern U.S. during the wee hours of Sunday, Feb. 9, about a day before reaching perigee, the closest point to Earth in its orbit — creating a full moon that appears slightly larger than average.

According to a new paper published Feb. 5 in the journal Nature, the color change is a signal of a water cycle on the first comet ever visited by a human probe.

The U.K.’s Ministry of Defense will publish secret UFO reports for the first time.