Space & Future

Is extracting oxygen from lunar soil the future of space exploration

A new race to the moon is emerging between the United States and China. Unlike fifty years ago, the goal is no longer just about...

Everything we thought we knew about dark energy could be wrong

For nearly 30 years, scientists have believed that a mysterious force called dark energy is causing the universe to expand faster and faster. But a...

The Sun is changing and we don’t know why

Put your ear to the ground in the right place and you can hear a train coming from miles away. Long before it appears on...

How Giant Galaxies Burned Bright and Died Young In the Early Universe

One of the biggest mysteries in astronomy is why some of the largest galaxies in the early universe stopped making stars surprisingly early in...

Red Dwarf Stars Caught Devouring Earth-Like Planets

Astronomers have discovered some of the clearest evidence yet that stars can consume their own planets. In a new study published in the journal Monthly...

Something just passed between us and a distant star

On the night of 18 December 2019, a star in our satellite galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud, briefly got brighter. Not dramatically nor explosively, just...

Ancient “Cosmic Cities” Were Already Shaping Galaxies Soon After the Big Bang

Astronomers have discovered that galaxies were already being shaped by their surroundings just 1.2 billion years after the Big Bang, much earlier than scientists...

Black Hole “Gold Rush” Reveals Hundreds of Hidden Cosmic Collisions

Astronomers have unveiled the largest collection yet of gravitational wave detections, marking a major leap forward in our understanding of black holes and the...

The Sun just did something nobody expected and it kept going for 19 days

The Sun is not known for being quiet! It blasts out energy equivalent to 100 billion nuclear bombs every single second, routinely hurls billion tonne...

Ancient Region Near Jupiter May Have Created Six Types of Meteorites

Scientists have discovered that a region just outside Jupiter’s orbit may have acted like a giant “planet factory” in the early solar system, producing...

A Beautiful Death How a Dying Star Created the Crystal Ball Nebula

Planetary nebulae like the Crystal Ball Nebula (NGC 1514) are sort of like stellar obituaries. Though crystal balls supposedly reveal the future, the Crystal Ball...

Scientists Detect Sand-Like Clouds That Vanish Daily on Alien World

Astronomers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have discovered unusual weather patterns on a giant exoplanet nearly 700 light-years away from Earth. The planet, called...

Deep Space

New fossil galaxy discovery could reveal the history of the universe

The fossil, which was uncovered via a systematic visual search of legacy survey images using the Mayall 4-metre telescope, led by Dr David Martinez...

8 million of virtual universes reveal how galaxies form

Scientists generated millions of different universes on a supercomputer, each of which obeyed different physical theories for how galaxies should form. Observing real galaxies in...

The unseen challenges of life on the moon

For the first time since the Apollo era, humans are preparing not just to visit the moon, but to live and work there for...

How we will search for signs of life in exoplanets

Whether there is life elsewhere in the universe is a question people have pondered for millennia; and within the last few decades, great strides...

Could dark matter turn giant planets into black holes?

Astronomers have discovered more than 5,000 planets orbiting stars beyond our solar system, known as exoplanets. These worlds are already changing how scientists think about...