Space

In June, a fledgling nation elected its first parliament. With more than 250,000 citizens, the new country’s population is bigger than that of Samoa. It boasts a flag, constitution and anthem. The catch? Asgardia, the first-ever “Space Kingdom”, is not a country on Earth. It’s based on a satellite currently in low Earth orbit. Asgardia

The Milky Way is a zombie. No, not really, it doesn’t go around eating other galaxies’ brains. But it did “die” once, before flaring back to life. That’s what a Japanese scientist has ascertained after peering into the chemical compositions of our galaxy’s stars. In a large section of the Milky Way, the stars can

Let’s face it. Most of us are never going to go to space. And none of us are going to visit the Orion Nebula. But we can dream – and now thanks to NASA, we can selfie our way into some of the most spectacular scenery in the Milky Way. To celebrate the 15th anniversary

In an age where everyone seems to be sharing everything on social media, sometimes we forget to think before we tweet. If you’re sharing the news of a new internship or job at NASA, take a note from Twitter user Naomi H’s book not to use bad ‘language’ on Twitter. A now deleted thread started

A year ago, the Great American total solar eclipse evoked awe, wonder and bewilderment, as Earth dwellers briefly had the chance to bask in the shadow of the Moon. Close to 200 million Americans viewed the spectacle in some way, including roughly 15 million lucky folks who managed to squeeze themselves within the path of

Well, well, well. Looks like the jig is up. The “new kind of aurora” discovered earlier this year, and subsequently named “STEVE” (if that is even its real name) has been rumbled. It seems Steve isn’t an aurora after all. But that doesn’t mean the game is over. Because Steve’s actual identity may be even

Shadowy craters near the Moon’s poles may hide untold reserves of ice – an incredibly precious resource in space – within reach of robotic and human explorers. That’s one big takeaway from a new study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The researchers took data from US and Indian lunar

In astronomy, cutting-edge technology often begins with a bunch of bulldozers, busted rocks, and dump trucks. So it goes with the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT), which will the world’s largest and most powerful when it sees “first light” in 2024. Astronomers hope to use the huge observatory to study the ancient universe and look for

This new Hubble image is an excellent way to remind yourself of the sheer enormity of the Universe. The space-based telescope pointed its delicate instrumentation at a particular region of the sky for hours, peering deep into space to a distance of 11 billion light-years – just 3 billion years after the Big Bang. It

Astronomers were just looking through photographs received from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on Monday, when they noticed something slightly out of place. There, on the surface of the enigmatic Red Planet, in one of the few regions not obscured by a dust storm, was none other than the wide-eyed Beaker – the shy and ill-fated

High above our heads, there’s a mysterious Russian satellite. And the strange way it’s acting – according to the US State Department – is unlike any satellite we’ve seen before. “We don’t know for certain what it is and there is no way to verify it,” US Assistant Secretary for Arms Control, Yleem D.S. Poblete,

If our Universe happened to be locked in an eternal heartbeat of expansion and collapse, black holes would leave an impression. And it could look just like a number of swirls recently detected in the faint echo of light at the edge of space. It’s hardly the smoking gun for what’s called the conformal cyclic

It’s starting to feel real. Boeing and Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) have contracts with NASA to fly astronauts to the International Space Station as part of what’s known as the Commercial Crew Program. Seven years after the end of the space shuttle program, NASA introduced the astronauts who will fly with both companies.

If planets come any hotter than KELT-9b we’re yet to find them. Not only does this roasted ball of gas win first prize for scorching temperatures, it can now claim to be the first planet known to have free-roaming atoms of iron and titanium in its atmosphere. To most of us, the discovery is just

Way out past Pluto, in the region of asteroid-filled space known as the Kuiper belt, NASA probe New Horizons just got a tantalising hint of a long-sought structure in the outer Solar System. An ultraviolet glow picked up by the probe’s Alice UV spectrometer could be evidence of the ‘hydrogen wall’, a region of dense

George Aldrich has more nicknames than most. Some people call him the Chief Sniffer. Others have called him Nostrildamus, NASA Nose and Master Sniffer. Aldrich prefers the term ‘nasalnaut’, because for several decades, he has been using his nose for the common good at NASA. “I have been a Chemical Specialist at NASA for 44

Gamma-ray bursts are the brightest and most energetic events in the Universe. They’re also some of the more mysterious – but now researchers have made a discovery that could help us understand the conditions under which they occur. The light curves of six gamma-ray burst events showed evidence of complex time-reversible wavelike structures – that

SpaceX, the aerospace company founded by Elon Musk, held a hush-hush conference in Colorado this week to formulate a plan for landing people on Mars and building an outpost. The inaugural ‘Mars Workshop’, first reported by Eric Berger at Ars Technica, happened Tuesday and Wednesday in Boulder, Colorado. SpaceX reportedly sent invitations to about 60

Martian dust storms are a pretty common occurrence, and generally happen whenever the southern hemisphere is experiencing summer. Though they can begin quite suddenly, these storms typically stay contained to a local area and last only about a few weeks. However, on occasion, Martian dust storms can grow to become global phenomena, covering the entire

A galaxy in nearby space called Segue 1 is quite the oddity. It’s very small, and very faint, it hangs out very close to the Milky Way, and no one knows quite where it came from. But now astronomers have accurately measured its movement for the first time, which has finally offered some clues. So