Space news stories

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.

Scientists have detected a strange new type of high-frequency wave on the sun’s surface, and the waves are moving three times faster than scientists thought was possible.

That’s according to researchers in Japan, who detailed their findings in two new papers presented at the 53rd annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Texas, March 7 to 11, 2022.

Overnight on March 24-25, 2022, another small asteroid raced toward Earth, unseen until hours before its closest approach.

A wild new theory suggests there may be another “anti-universe,” running backward in time prior to the Big Bang.

Astronomers and the European Space Agency’s planetary defence community recently spotted an asteroid just hours before it struck the Earth

Evidence suggests surface minerals of outer main-belt asteroids, proposed to have sourced building blocks of Earth’s water and life, are only stable at low temperatures. These asteroids formed in distant orbits and may help explain Earth’s composition

Some planets, like ours, rotate as they spin around their stars – an endless turning of day into night into day again. But other planets behave differently; tidally-locked to their stars, one side continually faces the sun, while the other is shrouded in perpetual darkness.

Astronomers have just found an absolute monster of a galaxy. Lurking some 3 billion light-years away, Alcyoneus is a giant radio galaxy reaching 5 megaparsecs into space. That’s 16.3 million light-years long, and constitutes the largest known structure of galactic origin.

All through history, humans have created and shared stories that ponder the creation of stars—what they are and how the first stars came to be.