Space news stories

Exclusive: astronomers surprised at size of 13bn-year-old object, which raises new questions about where black holes came from.

One of the biggest and brightest stars in the night sky will momentarily vanish as an asteroid passes in front of it to produce a one-of-a-kind eclipse. The rare and fleeting spectacle, late on Monday into early Tuesday, should be visible to millions of people…

Similar patterns develop on the surface of Earth’s polar regions when icy sediments cool and contract. A comparable process long ago may have created the shapes on Mars, found near the planet’s dry equator, researchers reported recently in Nature Astronomy.

Six planets that orbit their star in a coordinated dance have been discovered by scientists, who say the finding could help shed light on why planets in our own solar system move to their own beat.

Fragments from the asteroid US space agency Nasa has described as the most dangerous rock in the Solar System have arrived in the UK for study.

The astrophysicist and professor likes to ruffle feathers – and says his critics are merely jealous. He discusses UFOs, interstellar objects and the risks of his all-consuming search.

In 1991, physicists spotted a particle from space that crashed into Earth with so much energy that it warranted an “OMG!”A new particle of comparable energy has been found, researchers report in the Nov. 24 Science…And mysteriously, scientists are unable to pinpoint any cosmic source for the particle.

Venus is so tantalizingly close to being a twin of Earth. Its size, composition, and density are so similar to the properties of our homeworld… but when it comes to habitability, Venus couldn’t be more different.

The Great Sand Sea Desert stretches over an area of 72,000km² linking Egypt and Libya. If you find yourself in a particular part of the desert in south-east Libya and south-western parts of Egypt, you’ll spot pieces of yellow glass scattered across the sandy landscape.

Using the James Webb Space Telescope, an international team…has discovered the most distant barred spiral galaxy similar to the Milky Way that has been observed to date. The research, published in Nature, was led by scientists at the Centro de Astrobiología in Spain.

Several exoplanets at the edge of our galaxy could have formed continents — and advanced life — 5 billion years earlier than Earth, new research suggests.

Over the next six years, Euclid will survey a third of the heavens to get some clues about the nature of so-called dark matter and dark energy.

Some 4.5 billion years or so ago, scientists believe, something big smacked into Earth and knocked it ass over teakettle. The result was a bunch of debris hurled into space, swirling around until it formed the Moon. Of the big object, thought to be the size of Mars, and named Theia, nothing much was left. Or so we thought. See the research here.

The Moon’s youthful good looks are apparently deceptive. A new study of tiny grains of zircon in Apollo lunar samples suggests that it’s even older than we thought, by a good 40 million years. The research is due to be published in Geochemical Perspectives Letters.

Dozens of planet-sized objects have been discovered in the Orion Nebula via observations that could herald the existence of a new astronomical category…The objects are too small to be stars, but also defy the conventional definition of a planet because they are not in orbit around a parent star.

Galaxies from the early universe are more like our own Milky Way than previously thought, flipping the entire narrative of how scientists think about structure formation in the universe, according to new research.