The line between star and planet might be a lot finer than we think. Brown dwarfs are celestial objects that are more massive than a planet, but not quite massive enough to be stars. But astronomers have discovered two brown dwarfs that are so massive they’re challenging our understanding of star evolution. They’re called Epsilon

Most stars are just out there in space, doing their star thing, but not the pulsar called RX J0806.4-4123. It’s been caught doing something that’s never been seen before. It’s emitting infrared radiation – and only infrared radiation – at a huge distance. Long-distance emission from neutron stars is nothing new. But the fact RX

Elon Musk, the founder of the rocket company SpaceX, is about to reveal who the company’s first lunar space tourist will be. “SpaceX has signed the world’s first private passenger to fly around the Moon aboard our BFR launch vehicle – an important step toward enabling access for everyday people who dream of travelling to

A really weird form of matter found in ultradense objects such as neutron stars is looking like a good candidate for the strongest material in the Universe. According to new calculations, it clocks in at a massive 10 billion times stronger than steel. “This is a crazy-big figure,” physicist Charles Horowitz of Indiana University Bloomington

In of August of 2016, astronomers from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) confirmed the existence of an Earth-like planet around Proxima Centauri – the closest star to our Solar System. In addition, they confirmed that this planet (Proxima b) orbited within its star’s habitable zone. Since that time, multiple studies have been conducted to determine

SpaceX, the rocket company founded by Elon Musk, plans to launch a private citizen around the moon. The company’s announcement came Thursday night via Twitter, and it included a rendering of the spaceship that will make the voyage: the Big Falcon Rocket, or BFR. “SpaceX has signed the world’s first private passenger to fly around

The world’s most powerful telescopes have a lot of work to do. They’re tasked with helping us unravel the mysteries of the universe, like dark matter and dark energy. They’re burdened with helping us find other habitable worlds that might host life. And they’re busy with a multitude of other tasks, like documenting the end

Hubble has embarked on a new observation mission: to study the farthest reaches of the Universe, using some of the most massive objects in the Universe – galaxy clusters. And this newly released picture shows how. At the centre is Abell 370, a cluster of a few hundred galaxies located around 4 billion light-years from

The tiny pressure leak in the International Space Station (ISS) may have been found and fixed, but it is still causing all sorts of problems. After the leak was discovered on the Russian spacecraft attached to the ISS, it was determined that the 2 millimetre hole was made by a human hand. A special commission

Within near-Earth space, there are over 18,000 asteroids whose orbit occasionally brings them close to Earth. Over the course of millions of years, some of these Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) – which range from a few meters to tens of kilometers in diameter – may even collide with Earth. It is for this reason that the

A Russian cosmonaut aboard the International Space Station (ISS) posted a video Monday showing that a hole found in the Russian part of the station earlier this month had been sealed. The video, featuring cosmonaut Sergei Prokopyev on Monday, showed the two-millimetre hole now covered with a black sealant and hidden behind a fabric flap.

A new study of the binary asteroid Patroclus-Menoetius has revealed some clues about the chaotic and turbulent beginnings of our Solar System – primarily when Uranus and Neptune were bullied away from the Sun by Jupiter and Saturn. The pair of asteroids, both a little over 100 km (62 miles) in diameter, are part of

A massive number of new signals have been discovered coming from the notorious repeating fast radio source FRB 121102 – and we can thank artificial intelligence for these findings. Researchers at the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) project Breakthrough Listen applied machine learning to comb through existing data, and found 72 fast radio bursts that

Aurora chasers, get your cameras ready. A huge hole has opened in the Sun’s corona, which means we’re officially on geomagnetic storm watch – with auroras incoming across a huge swathe of North America. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has issued a storm watch for a G2-level solar storm on September 11. That’s

Well, this sure is one parade that’s getting rained out of existence. A spectacular astronomical event that had been predicted for 2022 now isn’t going to happen after all. Early in 2017, scientists forecast the collision of two stars in the constellation Cygnus – something that would result in a rare and wonderful phenomenon visible to

In 2003, the European Space Agency (ESA) launched the Small Missions for Advanced Research in Technology-1 (SMART-1) lunar orbiter. After taking 13 months to reach the Moon using a Solar Electric Propulsion (SEP) system, the orbiter then spent the next three years studying the lunar surface. Then, on September 3rd, 2006, the mission came to an end

It’s been 12 years since everyone’s favourite dwarf planet Pluto officially lost planet status. And ever since there’s been no end to the debate over whether or not that was the right call. Now a team of experts say the reason it was demoted in the first place isn’t valid. And, you guessed it, they’re

It’s been 12 years since everyone’s favourite dwarf planet Pluto officially lost planet status. And ever since there’s been no end to the debate over whether or not that was the right call. Now a team of experts say the reason it was demoted in the first place isn’t valid. And, you guessed it, they’re

There are many strange galaxies out there in space, but about 300 million light-years away is one that’s really something. It’s called AM 0644-741, or the Lindsay-Shapley Ring, and it’s what is known as a ring galaxy – shaped like a ring, with a darker region in the centre. Now astronomers have studied AM 0644-741

If you look at the Moon through a telescope, you might see something curious on the surface. The bright, undulating patterns are called lunar swirls, and their origins have been an ongoing mystery – not least because they are associated with powerful, localised magnetic fields. Now scientists think they may have solved a part of

If humans are going to send tiny probes across the vast distances of space, the designs of their sails will need to strike a delicate balance of mass, strength, and reflectivity. Now engineers have invented a nanomaterial that might just do the trick, helping us push space probes closer to light speed.  The new material,

Irish astrophysicist Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell has been awarded a prestigious Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, for discovering pulsars all the way back in 1967. A Cambridge PhD student at the time, Bell Burnell spotted a faint, repeating signal in the reams and reams of data she had to sift through at the newly

The first map of Jupiter’s magnetic field at a range of depths is in, and it solidifies something we already knew: that it’s really, really, really weird. Aside from that, though, it’s unlike anything else planetary scientists have ever seen. We already knew that the gas giant’s external magnetic field was an odd duck. For

There’s something strange over Saturn’s north pole. A tremendous structure towering high above the clouds indicates that the planet’s peculiar hexagonal formation is much, much bigger than was initially apparent. The data comes from Cassini, which, a year after its demise plunging into Saturn’s opaque atmosphere, is still leading us to new discoveries. When the

From continuing observations of a neutron star collision we caught last year, astrophysicists have found something wild – the crash spewed forth a thin jet of superfast particles into space, travelling at nearly the speed of light, but appearing to move much faster thanks to an optical illusion. The collision was observed in August of

Rocket launches are difficult. They’re expensive, they require an insane amount of fuel, their exhausts blast pollution into the atmosphere. One concept that seems straight out of science fiction could solve these problems: an elevator connecting Earth and space. And now Japanese engineers are about to start testing one. On September 11, a team from

Last week astronauts on board the International Space Station (ISS) awoke to a worrying message from flight control. Hidden somewhere on board the ISS was a tiny pressure leak that was slowly allowing air to seep out of the spacecraft and into the abyss. The six astronauts on board were not in any imminent danger,

There are a lot of space maps out there, but we’d be willing to bet there’s never been one quite like this. It’s entirely knitted out of yarn, using a 1980s domestic knitting machine brilliantly turned into a network printer. The genius behind it is Australian software engineer Sarah Spencer, who used a Raspberry Pi,

Humans are going to get to Mars, eventually – even if we’re still decades away from an actual colony, it is likely to happen one day. And the problem of how we’re going to survive on the Red Planet still needs a viable solution. It’s possible that humanity’s future homes on Mars will end up

It’s been almost two months since NASA last heard from the Mars Opportunity rover, and things are not looking good. Ever since the Red Planet became engulfed in an intense and enormous dust storm, the rover team has been trying desperately to contact their precious vehicle. Three times a week, every week since June 10,

Social media went nuts on Wednesday night over a line of bright lights that appeared briefly in the sky over San Diego before vanishing. Reports came from far and wide, with shaky footage uploaded to Youtube and blurry pics shared across Twitter giving us plenty of images, but little information to go on. What are

In July of 2015, NASA’s New Horizons mission made history when it became the first spacecraft to conduct a flyby of Pluto. Since that time, the spacecraft’s mission was extended so it could make its way farther into the outer Solar System and become the first spacecraft to explore some Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs). It’s

Saturn has been out there getting up to its old tricks again: looking really spectacular and being super interesting. This time, it’s in a series of photos taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, showing the planet’s breathtaking auroras. Over a period of seven months in 2017, the space-based telescope used its Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph

The International Space Station (ISS) is amazing. Floating 408 kilometres (254 miles) above us, astronauts get to do science experiments, and take great photos of Earth spinning beneath them. But it’s also tiny, a terrible place to poop, and occationally it springs leaks. On Wednesday at 23:00 UTC (19:00 EDT), flight controllers began to notice

Black holes are famous for tearing apart and devouring stars. But new simulations suggest that, in the very final moments, black holes can actually bring stars back to life. But only certain stars, in certain conditions – and the perfect storm involved could help solve a perplexing black hole mystery. So, how is this possible?

What’s up with the Sun? As we’ve said previous, what the Sun isn’t doing is the big news of 2018 in solar astronomy. Now, the Sun sent us another curveball this past weekend, with the strange tale of growing sunspot AR 2720. We’re currently headed towards a solar minimum, forecasted to arrive in 2019 as

Astronauts may be exceptionally brave, intelligent, and accomplished, but they’re not superhuman: they still have to poop and pee when they leave Earth. But as NASA was working to get the first humans into space in the early 60s, the agency didn’t focus much on how astronauts would empty their bladders and evacuate their bowels

On August 21 last year, the US came to a standstill to watch the incredibly rare alignment of the Moon sliding in front of the Sun, completely blocking its rays. But for a team of scientists, the anticipation of this total solar eclipse was perhaps even more intense as they waited to see the shapes

It was July 1969 when Neil Armstrong’s boot first landed on the rocky surface of the Moon. “One small step for man,” Armstrong declared. “One giant leap for mankind”. The crackling message, which journeyed from the lunar surface all the way back to ground control in Houston, is one of the most famous and well-travelled

A global dust storm on Mars is threatening the future of NASA’s Opportunity rover, the longest-lived robot on that planet. The golf-cart-size vehicle launched toward Mars in June 2003, landed in January 2004, and was supposed to last three months. Today, the rover is 15 years old and has rolled more than a marathon’s worth

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