Space news stories

In a former gold mine a mile underground, inside a titanium tank filled with a rare liquified gas, scientists have begun the search for what so far has been unfindable: dark matter.

The image is said to be the deepest, most detailed infrared view of the Universe to date, containing the light from galaxies that has taken many billions of years to reach us.

Researchers have discovered never-before-seen types of crystal hidden in tiny grains of perfectly preserved meteorite dust. The dust was left behind by a massive space rock that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, nine years ago.

There’s alcohol up in space. No, it’s not bottles of wine discarded by careless astronauts; rather, it’s in microscopic molecular form. Now researchers think they’ve discovered the largest alcohol molecule in space yet, in the form of propanol.

A first-of-its-kind study published in the journal Icarus investigates this phenomenon on Mars. Looking at the planet, researchers have discovered hundreds of craters that likely resulted from the impacts of a binary system, where one asteroid orbits another, like the moon orbits Earth.

Image from ESA & MPS for OSIRIS Team (Wiki Commons)

This rare planetary alignment has been visible since early June. But the view should be particularly impressive this week, as Mercury is at its brightest and the waning moon joins the parade of planets.

As if cracking open a cosmic Russian nesting doll, astronomers have peered into the center of the Milky Way and discovered what appears to be a miniature spiral galaxy, swirling daintily around a single large star.

“It’s a lesson in the unexpected,” Jones said. “When you’re looking for things, you’re not necessarily going to find the thing you’re looking for, but you might find something else very interesting.”

The varied surface of asteroid Psyche suggests a dynamic history, which could include metallic eruptions, asteroid-shaking impacts, and a lost rocky mantle.

Mars object thought to be piece of thermal blanket from when Perseverance touched down on planet

A team led by University of California, Berkeley, astronomers has for the first time discovered what may be a free-floating black hole by observing the brightening of a more distant star as its light was distorted by the object’s strong gravitational field—so-called gravitational microlensing.

Nasa is launching a study of UFOs as part of a new push toward high-risk, high-impact science.

A new member of a category of star so rare we can count the known number of them on our fingers and toes has just been discovered in the Milky Way.

A newly discovered source of repeating fast radio bursts has deepened the mystery of what, precisely, could be producing these powerful outbursts.