Space news stories

There are a lot of unexplained objects out there in the Universe, and astronomers have just found another one – a strange, dusty object that may be causing its host star to dim by up to 75 percent.

A dense, magnetic star violently erupted and spat out as much energy as a billion suns — and it happened in a fraction of a second, scientists recently reported.

On the grand cosmic scale, our little corner of the Universe isn’t all that special – this idea lies at the heart of the Copernican principle. Yet there’s one major aspect about our planet that’s peculiar indeed: Our Sun is a yellow dwarf.

Just over a year after Japan’s Hayabusa2 mission returned the first subsurface sample of an asteroid to Earth, scientists have determined that the near-Earth asteroid Ryugu is a pristine remnant from the formation of our solar system.

If you want to be dazzled by a spectacular northern lights display, your best bet is to skywatch near the North Pole. But that wasn’t the case 41,000 years ago, when a disruption of Earth’s magnetic field sent auroras wandering toward the equator.

You’re looking at a 300-megapixel photo of our Sun. Astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy used a specially modified telescope, taking over 150,000 individual photos and combining them into this magnificent image.

The Solar System exists in a bubble. Wind and radiation from the Sun stream outwards, pushing out into interstellar space. This creates a boundary of solar influence, within which the objects in the Solar System are sheltered from powerful cosmic radiation.

An international team of astronomers led by researchers from the Netherlands has found no trace of dark matter in the galaxy AGC 114905, despite taking detailed measurements over a course of fourty hours with state-of-the-art telescopes. They will present their findings in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

A team of researchers from Germany, France and the U.K. has discovered a long thin filament of dense gas connecting two of the Milky Way galaxy’s spiral arms. In their paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, the group describes their work studying carbon monoxide gas in the galaxy.

A spacecraft has launched on a mission to test technology that could one day tip a dangerous asteroid off course.

Meteor impact sites might seem like easy things to recognize, with giant craters in Earth’s surface showing where these far-flung objects finally came to a violent stop. But it’s not always that way.

Physically speaking, our Universe seems uncannily perfect. It stands to reason that if it wasn’t, life as we know it – and planets, atoms, everything else really – wouldn’t exist.

Wormholes, or portals between black holes, may be stable after all, a wild new theory suggests.

There’s a lot we still don’t know about dark matter – that mysterious, invisible mass that could make up as much as 85 percent of everything around us – but a new paper outlines a rather unusual hypothesis about the very creation of the stuff.

Scientists have identified what appears to be a small chunk of the moon that is tracking the Earth’s orbit around the Sun.

Some of the ingredients necessary for life didn’t take very long to emerge after the Universe winked into existence.