Giant liquid mirrors could revolutionize the hunt for habitable worlds
Imagine a space telescope with a mirror stretching 50 meters across!
That's larger than the width of a U.K. soccer field and nearly eight times...
Chang’e-6 uncovers hidden history of the moon’s mysterious farside
For decades, scientists have wondered why the moon’s two sides are so different.
The side we see from Earth, known as the nearside, is smoother...
The Milky Way’s ghost galaxies: Are we surrounded by invisible neighbors?
The Milky Way might have many more neighboring galaxies than we’ve been able to detect so far, according to new research from scientists at...
Ancient riverbeds reveal Mars was wetter and warmer than we thought
New research has uncovered more than 15,000 kilometers of ancient riverbeds on Mars, suggesting that the Red Planet may have once been much wetter...
How your flight home could be broadcasting Earth’s location to aliens
Every time you take off from Heathrow, land at JFK, or pass through any major airport, you might be inadvertently announcing humanity's existence to...
What if you threw a paper airplane from the space station
Sometimes there are profound questions in life that must be answered, like “What is the meaning of existence?”, “Are we alone in the universe?”...
“Third Wheel” star brings companions closer together
When white dwarfs—the hot remnants of stars like our Sun—are orbited closely by another star, they sometimes steal mass away from their companion.
The stolen...
Dark matter could create dark dwarfs at the center of the Milky Way
Dark matter is one of Nature's most confounding mysteries.
It keeps particle physicists up at night and cosmologists glued to their supercomputer simulations.
We know it's...
Space ice isn’t just frozen water—it’s full of tiny crystals
Ice in space, long believed to be completely disordered like frozen water without structure, is turning out to be more complex.
New research from University...
Tiny space pebbles reveal the birth of new solar systems
Astronomers have taken a big step forward in understanding how solar systems like ours are born.
Using a special set of radio telescopes in the...