Alien worlds may be all the rage, with their mystique and promise, but the orb we call home, planet Earth, has all the makings for a jaw-dropping blockbuster movie: from the drama of explosive volcanoes, past meteor crashes and catastrophic collisions between rocky plates to the seeming fantasy of the ocean’s deep abysses swirling with … Read more
Looking to make a fresh start amongst the stars? Here are a few options and today we are counting down our picks for the Top 10 Places for New Human Colonies In Our Solar System. For this list, we’re looking at planets, moons and dwarf planets orbiting our sun that could potentially be colonized in … Read more
From snazzy banded agates to volcanic elephants, there are some pretty weird rocks out there. But the weirdest ones geologists find might be those that fall from space. One of them called the Hypatia stone, it might be, the strangest of them all. In fact, all signs currently suggest that this rock’s origin story is … Read more
While travelling in space, one of the hardest things to do is to stop or change direction. Without anything to push against or friction to slow things down, spacecraft need to do all the hard work of changing their speed or path by there thrusters. And sometimes they do that in ways you would never … Read more
How does a space probe like Voyager 2 which was launched in 1977 visit the four outer planets and travel over 17 billion kilometres over space with almost next there nothing in the way of fuel? By the time Voyager 2 had reached Neptune it had swung by Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus travelled 7 billion kilometres and was still … Read more
After studying the solar system for hundreds of years, you would think we, at least, have the basics figured out, stuff like why planets spin and orbit the way they do. Except, we totally don’t. And you only have to look at the planet next door to see it. When scientists began observing Venus in detail in the 1950s … Read more
In the grand scheme of things, we have not been at the space exploration game very long, but we have already learned a ton about the solar system. We have sent probes to planets and asteroids and comets. We know what they look like, what they are made of, their temperatures, atmospheres and so much more. But … Read more
The moon is our planet’s constant, dependable companion. Whether it’s waxing, waning, or shining in its full glory, it always presents the same face to Earth: a mottled, monochrome landscape of black and white rocks. Depending on where you are in the world, you might see different things in that great inkblot in the sky. Some see the … Read more
Shooting stars may fill you with child-like wonder, but these celestial showstoppers are also reminders that Earth is hardly alone in space, and some of those cosmic objects can be downright dangerous. The Perseid meteor shower, which appears every year in mid-August, occurs when Earth passes through a trail of debris left by Comet Swift-Tuttle. … Read more
A massive stellar flare on a baby star has been spotted by University of Warwick astronomers, shedding light on the origins of potentially habitable exoplanets. One of the largest ever seen on a star of its type, the huge explosion of energy and plasma is around 10,000 times bigger than the largest solar flare ever … Read more
Everything around you – your desk, your laptop, your coffee cup – in fact, even you – is made of stardust, the stuff forged in the fiery furnaces of stars that died before our Sun was born. Probing the space surrounding a mysterious stellar corpse, scientists at the University of Arizona have made a discovery … Read more
A team of researchers at Yamagata University and Teikyo University of Science, in Japan, have recently developed a new roving biologger, or whale rover, which can travel along a sperm whale’s body surface and collect valuable behavioural data. Biologging entails the biological tracking of individual animals, typically by attaching small dataloggers directly to their bodies. … Read more
New NASA research confirms that Saturn is losing its iconic rings at the maximum rate estimated from Voyager 1 & 2 observations made decades ago. The rings are being pulled into Saturn by gravity as a dusty rain of ice particles under the influence of Saturn’s magnetic field. “We estimate that this ‘ring rain’ drains … Read more
NASA’s Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) spacecraft completed its 1.2 billion-mile (2 billion-kilometre) journey to arrive at the asteroid Bennu Monday. The spacecraft executed a manoeuvre that transitioned it from flying toward Bennu to operating around the asteroid. Now, at about 11.8 miles (19 kilometres) from Bennu’s Sun-facing surface, OSIRIS-REx will begin … Read more
A new study bolsters the idea that strange grooves crisscrossing the surface of the Martian moon Phobos were made by rolling boulders blasted free from an ancient asteroid impact. The research, published in Planetary and Space Science, uses computer models to simulate the movement of debris from Stickney crater, a huge gash on one end … Read more