New experiments show that the asteroids that slammed into Earth and the moon more than 4 billion years ago were vaporised into a mist of iron. The findings, published in Nature Geoscience, suggest that…
Two views of Ceres acquired by NASA’s Dawn spacecraft ten hours apart on Feb. 12, 2015, from a distance of about 52,000 miles as the dwarf planet rotated.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA
In a few billion years, the sun will become a red giant so large that it will engulf our planet. But the Earth will become uninhabitable much sooner than that. After about a billion years the sun will…
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics image of a supernova explosion discovered by Johannes Kepler in 1604.
Flickr/X-ray: NASA/CXC/NCSU/M.Burkey et al; Infrared: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Our understanding of heavy element production in supernovae, exploding stars way beyond our solar system, may need to change following some discoveries we have made looking not to the skies, but deep under…
Artist’s impression of New Horizons as it swings past the dwarf planet Pluto, in July 2015.
NASA
While the Mars Rovers and the Rosetta spacecraft will continue to make headlines in 2015, the stage is set for the solar system’s next great mission – the Pluto-bound New Horizons. Discovered in 1930…
Looking west after sunset on Friday September 26, the thin waxing crescent moon forms a triangle with Mercury and Spica, the brightest star in the constellation of Virgo. You can see how far Mercury has…
The dawn of a new day.
Flickr/Christos Tsoumplekas
What makes our sun shine has been a mystery for most of human history. Given our sun is a star and stars are suns, explaining the source of the sun’s energy would help us understand why stars shine. An…
Our moon orbits the Earth in the same way satellites do.
Flickr/Alexey Kljatov
Take a look at the moon and it isn’t hard to imagine it as a planet. A 3,476 kilometres-in-diameter ball of rock, with basalt plains and mountain ranges, whose gravitational pull produces tides here on…
A new approach to dating the birth of our solar system could help find other similar systems.
Flickr/Dmitry Boyarin
Without the sun, there would be no Earth – but amazingly, we don’t know the finer details about the prenatal history of our sun, where it was born and if other stars in our galaxy share a similar history…
On August 6, millions of miles away from Earth, the firing of a rocket thruster signalled the end of a decade-long journey by a European spacecraft to reach its ultimate target – a comet. The spacecraft…
An artist’s impression shows a pair of wildly misaligned planet-forming gas discs around both the young stars in the binary system HK Tauri.
R. Hurt (NASA/JPL-Caltech/IPAC)
Jonti Horner, University of Southern Queensland and Tanya Hill, Museums Victoria Research Institute
New observations of a youthful binary star system, reported today in the journal Nature, may help to explain one of exoplanetary science’s greatest unanswered questions – the peculiar orbits of so many…
In June, the popular press went wild. A planet had been discovered that was so much like Earth it was heralded as our best bet for supporting life. Positioned 16 light years away, Gliese (or GJ) 832c was…
Jupiter’s Great Red Spot was much bigger when photographed by Voyager back in 1979.
NASA
NASA revealed today that the iconic Great Red Spot on Jupiter has shrunk to its smallest size ever – and astronomers have no idea why. The Great Red Spot is a giant anticyclone storm that has been raging…
One of Saturn’s many moons, Enceladus seems to have a large body of water hiding under its icy crust.
NASA
An ocean of water has been found underneath the icy crust of Enceladus, Saturn’s sixth largest moon, according to observations of the Cassini spacecraft published in Science today. This result has come…
Finding liquid water on a celestial body within the solar system is exciting. The only thing that is probably more exciting is finding an ocean full of it. Today such news comes via Cassini, which has…
Artist’s impression of the rings around Chariklo.
ESO/L. Calçada/Nick Risinger
In a surprise discovery two rings have been found around the remote asteroid Chariklo, which lies more than a billion kilometres from Earth. This is the first time rings have been discovered around an…
A new, planet-like body has been found on the outer edges of the solar system. This object, called 2012VP113, is the second body of its class found since the identification of the dwarf planet Sedna in…
Comets no longer have clear cut definitions.
johntewell
Comet ISON’s fate has left many sad. For the public, the comet could have made for a spectacular view in December. For scientists, it would have been a chance to learn more about these mysterious bodies…