Space news stories

Imagine the Milky Way’s 100 billion stars as a flat, tranquil pool of water. Now, picture someone dropping a stone the size of 400 million suns into that water. The tranquility is shattered. Wave after wave of energy ripples across the galaxy’s surface, jostling and bouncing its stars in a chaotic dance that takes eons to calm.

The findings are in the latest research to be published from analysis of 5.4 grammes of stones and dust that the Hayabusa-2 probe gathered from the asteroid Ryugu.

On September 26 at 11.15 pm UTC, NASA’s DART mission (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) will be the first to deliberately and measurably change the motion of a significant body in our Solar System.

The recently launched super space telescope James Webb has returned spectacular new imagery of Neptune.

Swirling around the planet’s equator, the rings of Saturn are a dead giveaway that the planet is spinning at a tilt.

Every year, millions of rocky shards from outer space burn up in Earth’s atmosphere, many briefly flaring and appearing in the sky as “shooting stars.” But how many survive their high-speed plunges to strike the ground?

The world’s most powerful telescope has made its first observations of a planet beyond our solar system, heralding a new era of astronomy in which distant worlds can be scanned for signs of life.

The world’s largest and most powerful space telescope has revealed unprecedented views of Jupiter.

Tiny fragments of rock brought back from an asteroid in near-Earth solar orbit are so old, they predate the Solar System.

A new study of a meteorite that landed on Earth reveals how this asteroid activity occurs. Small collisions can dislodge the pebbles, which shoot off the asteroid but fall back, drawn in by the space rock’s gravitational pull.

The annual Perseids shower lasts more than a month, but will peak this week.

In our Universe, time has been progressing forward, for all observers, ever since the inception of the hot Big Bang. There are a few “arrows of time” that coincide with this, including that the Universe has been expanding and, thermodynamically, that entropy has been increasing. If the Universe instead were to contract and collapse, could that lead to time running backwards?

A dormant black hole nine times the mass of the Sun has been found outside the Milky Way for the first time, in what researchers have called a “very exciting discovery”.

A team of researchers with affiliations to multiple institutions in the U.S. has found that the metal content of Fermi bubble high-velocity clouds does not match with material in the Milky Way’s galactic center, suggesting that at least some of the material comes from somewhere else.