Space news stories

In the early hours of 30 April 2022, we’ll have the chance to see Venus and Jupiter ‘nearly collide’ as they appear to move incredibly close together from our vantage point.

We still don’t know just how the first life emerged on Earth. One suggestion is that the building blocks arrived here from space; now, a new study of several carbon-rich meteorites has added weight to this idea

The two brightest planets will be a beauty to spot if you can find somewhere with a low enough eastern horizon.

Image from: User:1j1z2 (Wiki Commons)

Surface features similar to ones seen on Greenland ice sheet suggest underground liquid water that could host organic matter.

Beacon of Galaxy message could be sent into heart of Milky Way, where life is deemed most likely to exist.

Nasa’s Hubble telescope has determined the comet’s icy nucleus has a mass of about 500 trillion tonnes and is 85 miles (137km) wide – larger than the US state of Rhode Island.

A new model of the very early universe proposes that the graviton, the quantum mechanical force carrier of gravity, flooded the cosmos with dark matter before normal matter even had a chance to get started.

Five planets, visible to the naked eye, are poised to line up and march across the sky this summer in an unusual alignment that will be graced by the light of the moon.

No matter where you’re standing on Earth, you can only ever see one face of the Moon. Its other cheek is perennially turned away from our planet, and this far side is much more pockmarked with craters than the one facing us.

The super-distant galaxy could have either a supermassive black hole or a nursery of incredibly quick-forming stars.

Scientists have observed an enormous planet about nine times the mass of Jupiter at a remarkably early stage of formation – describing it as still in the womb – in a discovery that challenges the current understanding of planetary formation.

It turns out that Mars is rumblier than we knew. New techniques have revealed previously undetected quakes beneath the Martian surface – and, scientists say, the best explanation so far is ongoing volcanic activity.

The most distant star ever seen has been captured by the Hubble space telescope in images that appear to give a remarkable glimpse into the ancient universe.

Helium-3, a rare isotope of helium gas, is leaking out of Earth’s core, a new study reports. Because almost all helium-3 is from the Big Bang, the gas leak adds evidence that Earth formed inside a solar nebula, which has long been debated.

Existence of volcanoes makes idea that dwarf planet is inert ball of ice look increasingly improbable.

The Milky Way is older than astronomers thought, or part of it is. A newly-published study shows that part of the disk is two billion years older than we thought.