The Planetary Society has been busy recently. On June 25, its LightSail 2 launched into orbit; just last week on July 24, the craft opened its sails successfully, a key stage of its mission to demonstrate solar sailing in practice. And now, the nonprofit foundation has released a statement, revealing that tomorrow (July 31), there is

The spinning ball of plasma that is our Sun produces a spinning magnetic field too, and where that magnetic field weakens, solar winds can escape. Now scientists have been able to recreate those same effects in a lab for the first time, meaning we can study the bizarre science around our star at close quarters,

We may have discovered thousands of exoplanets, but few have astronomers as excited as a newly discovered system located just 73 light-years away. It could not only tell us about planet formation, it could lead us to the discovery of a habitable world. Around an unusually quiet red dwarf 73 light-years away, the planet-hunting TESS

When Japanese probe Hayabusa2 touched down on asteroid Ryugu on 11 July 2019, its camera was not sitting idle. The entire event was photographed using its small monitor cam (CAM-H). Now JAXA has compiled those images into an animation, showing the probe closing in to collect mineral samples, then bouncing back off again to resume

Locals at the southern tip of Texas took in an otherworldly sight on Thursday night: A giant mirror-polished machine roared to life near a beach, and through a billowing cloud of orange-coloured smoke, rose six stories into the sky, hovered, and then gently landed. Though the launch lasted less than a minute, the late-night spectacle

In the northern constellation of Ursa Minor, a star is dying. It’s not going quietly, either. It’s wracked by ‘coughs’ that send shockwaves expelling its outer material into the space around it. And this is giving us a glimpse of what’s going to happen to our own Sun, in just a few billion years. The star

The International Space Station (ISS) is the single biggest spacecraft ever built, and one of the most sophisticated machines put in orbit by human kind. Against the fiery backdrop of our Sun, however, the achievement – roughly the size of a football field – looks decidedly puny. A dazzling picture, taken in broad daylight by photographer

A 100-metre-wide (328-feet-wide) asteroid passed just 70,000 kilometers from Earth on Thursday, Australian time. It was discovered by the Brazilian SONEAR survey just days ago, and its presence was announced mere hours before it zoomed past our planet. The lack of warning shows how quickly potentially dangerous asteroids can sneak up on us. The asteroid,

The waxing and waning of sunspots forms part of our Sun’s natural cycle, but it’s a phenomenon astronomers still don’t fully understand. Now, new research has revealed that particular “terminator” events are what brings sunspot cycles to an end, and it means we could get better at predicting them. That would be rather useful, too.

Another test of a star orbiting our galaxy’s supermassive black hole at insane speeds has once again upheld the theory of general relativity as described by Albert Einstein in 1915. As it hurtled around the black hole on its closest approach, the light of a star named S2 was stretched out by the intense gravitational

Our Sun is a lone wolf of a star, but out there in the wider Universe, stars are often locked in a dance with others, orbiting a mutual centre of gravity. In one such triple-star system, astronomers have just found an exoplanet. It has the rather catchy name LTT 1445Ab, as it orbits the primary

LightSail 2 has successfully deployed its solar sails. Shortly after 12:00 pm PST (19:00 UTC) The Planetary Society tweeted that the sails were deployed, and that the spacecraft was sailing with sunlight. We can all enjoy their success and start to wonder how solar sails will fit into humanity’s plans for space exploration. SAIL DEPLOYMENT

Just 7,800 light-years from Earth, two dead stars have been discovered orbiting each other at record-breaking speeds. So close is their orbit, that astronomers expect to detect gravitational waves from this pair in a matter of years, when we turn on more sensitive tools. We’re used to things on cosmic scales happening pretty slowly, but

As far back as our collective memory extends, we’ve been mesmerised by the dance of the planets across our skies. Even now, despite all our knowledge and technology, their basic movements can still surprise and captivate us. The waltz between Earth and Venus around the Sun has been doing just that, for centuries – and

A team of researchers at the University of California says that there could be way more ice water on the surface of the Moon than previously believed – and that could be a huge deal for future missions to the Moon. By comparing shaded areas that are protected from the Sun on the surface of

Our planet is part of the larger structure of the Solar System, shaped and made stable by the force of gravity. Our Solar System is gravitationally bound to the Milky Way galaxy, along with hundreds of millions of other solar systems. And our galaxy is also part of a larger structure, where not only gravity,

Varunavi Sreejith, 13, gaped at the screen in front of her, inching to the edge of her seat as the clock ticked down to 2:43 p.m. When Chandrayaan-2, India’s second lunar mission, took off, she jumped up, clapping, a bright smile lighting up her face. “I am very proud and relieved,” Varunavi said. A student

LightSail 2, the brainchild of The Planetary Society, has gifted us two new gorgeous images of Earth. The small spacecraft is currently in orbit at about 720 km, and the LightSail 2 mission team is putting it through its paces in preparation for solar sail deployment sometime on or after Sunday, July 21st. LightSail 2

On Friday, the Chinese space station Tiangong-2 was spectacularly decommissioned — it was set on a crash course with a remote patch of the Pacific Ocean called the “Spacecraft Cemetery.” Tiangong-2 is no more, but we can re-live its final moments. The state-owned China Global Television Network posted a YouTube video of the space station

SpaceX filled the South Texas air with the roar of a Raptor engine on Tuesday night. However, Elon Musk’s rocket company also set off a fireball that briefly engulfed the rocket ship that the engine was attached to. The rocket, called Starhopper, is a squat, six-story prototype of a larger interplanetary launch system known as

Even though we can see the Moon shining brightly in the night sky – and sometimes in daylight – it’s hard to put into perspective just how large, and just how distant, our nearest neighbour actually is. So just how big is the Moon? That answer isn’t quite as straightforward as you might think. Like

Strange voids out there in space – pockets of near nothingness between galaxies – could be crucial in measuring the expansion of the Universe with greater precision than we’ve ever managed before, new research says. Experts have been able to use a new method to accurately measure the distortion caused by Doppler shifts on the

An orbit has now been decided for the first permanent lunar outpost. When the lunar Gateway space station gets into position around the Moon, it will be in a highly eccentric “halo” orbit, perpendicular to Earth. This particular type of orbit is called a near rectilinear halo orbit (NRHO). It helps minimise the use of

It’s all about the detail. In a way, Mars looks like a dusty, dead, dry, boring planet. But science says otherwise. Science says that Mars used to be wet and warm, with an atmosphere. And science says that it was wet and warm for billions of years, easily long enough for life to appear and

Exhale. We are safe from the asteroid that scary headlines were warning us about in early June, according to new observations from the European Space Agency and the European Southern Observatory. The space rock is called 2006 QV89. It’s around 20 to 50 metres (65 to 164 feet) across, and its orbit around the Sun

Stars aren’t supposed to come back to life after the death throes of the supernova stage, but astronomers have spotted three that have done just that – surviving the catastrophic explosion that usually marks the end of a star’s life, and heading off through the galaxy on a new adventure. These peculiar ‘zombie’ stars move

When astronauts first saw Earth from afar in the Apollo 8 mission in 1968 – the US’s second manned mission to the Moon – they described a cognitive shift in awareness after seeing our planet “hanging in the void.” This state of mental clarity, called the “overview effect”, occurs when you are flung so far

There may be fundamental flaws with our understanding of the Universe. The problem came to light as scientists tried to calculate and measure a value called the Hubble Constant, which represents how rapidly the Universe is expanding outward. The value was first calculated by astronomer Edwin Hubble in the 1920s. But since then, astronomers observing

SpaceX thinks it may know what caused its new Crew Dragon spaceship to explode during a test on April 20. The capsule-like ship is designed to ferry NASA astronauts to and from the International Space Station, but it first has to pass a series of major tests. In April, SpaceX conducted an uncrewed ground test

The plot has thickened on a huge discovery from earlier this year that appeared to prove the existence of seemingly ‘impossible’ long-lived galaxies – ones without any dark matter. According to new distance calculations, the galaxy in question is much closer than initial measurements suggested. This changes both the mass of the galaxy as a

India called off the launch of its much-awaited second lunar mission shortly before liftoff Monday, citing a technical snag, in a setback for the country’s growing ambitions in space. The countdown clock for the Chandrayaan-2 mission – which had been due to blast off from the country’s east coast at 2:51 am – was halted

Should everything go according to plan, more than 1.1 million strangers will gather in a remote Nevada town in mid-September, united by a common goal: to raid Area 51 in the wee hours of the morning — using a strength-in-numbers approach to reveal any extraterrestrial treasures stashed within the notoriously clandestine government base. Or, put

Once upon a time, the great planet Jupiter was orbited by a glorious ring of dust, according to astronomers. Now, nothing of it remains, having coalesced long ago into the planet’s Galilean moons. But these moon-forming discs should be found around other planets in alien star systems. And for the first time we have confirmation

While our warming atmosphere on Earth threatens many living things, spurring on global warming on Mars could be the key to making the planet habitable for Earthly life. And scientists think they may have identified a material that can help turn up the thermostat for parts of the Red Planet. “Mars is the most habitable

If all goes to plan, in November this year the International Space Station (ISS) is about to get a bit spicier. Researchers are hoping to send up Española chili pepper plants (Capsicum annuum), which could make peppers the very first fruit to be grown in space by US astronauts. “We were also looking for varieties

SpaceX is about to perform its most ambitious test-launch yet of a shiny Mars rocket prototype in south Texas. Workers have descended upon the developing coastal launch site over the past 8 months to build and prepare the stout, three-legged prototype for testing. It’s built out of stainless steel, has the shape of a badminton

Something strange is happening 130 milling light-years away in spiral galaxy NGC 3147: there’s a thin disc of material surrounding its small and ‘starving’ black hole that’s a complete surprise to astronomers. Discs like the one spotted in NGC 3147 – made up of gas, dust and other debris pulled into the black hole’s orbit

Earth is not alone, and a stunning new animation created using NASA data beautifully illustrates that point. There may be trillions of other planets in our galaxy, the Milky Way (which itself is one of hundreds of billions of other galaxies in the universe). But finding such extrasolar planets, or exoplanets, is not easy –

The life of an asteroid is lonely. The rocks spend eons drifting through the cold vacuum of space. But on Wednesday, the asteroid Ryugu welcomed a special visitor: Japan’s Hayabusa-2 probe successfully landed on the asteroid’s surface at 21:06 ET (01:06 UTC on Thursday). The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) launched Hayabusa-2 into space in

It’s easy to take for granted the detailed, almost real-time knowledge of Mars that we have at our fingertips. After all, in the not-too-distant past, Mars was largely mysterious. All we had were ground-based images of the planet. Now? Now we have daily weather reports and images of dust storms. Martian dust storms are one

Thanks to gravitational wave astronomy, we are getting a better understanding of what happens when black holes collide. But the closely orbiting black holes only generate ripples in space-time strong enough to be detected from just before they smash. What happens before then? We can only extrapolate. But a new discovery could change all that.

India is getting ready to launch its first-ever lunar lander on Sunday 14 July. As part of the Chandrayaan-2 mission, the lander will be riding on top of the country’s most powerful rocket, the Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle Mark III. The plan is to both launch an orbiter module and a 56-pound (25 kilogram) mobile

You’ve heard of moonmoons – that’s what scientists want to call the satellite of a moon. But are you ready for ploonets? You’d better be, because we’re here to tell you about this hypothetical new class of cosmic objects. It is exactly what it sounds like: a sort-of cross between a moon and a planet.

Einstein’s theory of general relativity has been proven time and again, and is generally accepted as a solid foundation for understanding the Universe. But it’s not the only model for explaining how gravity works and galaxies form – and new research has shown a different model under which the Milky Way could have come to

When astronomers around the world watched two neutron stars collide in August 2017, it taught us a whole lot of cool things about the Universe. Now there’s one more cool thing: Astronomers have used it to refine one of the most fundamental characteristics of the entire Universe – the Hubble Constant. The Hubble Constant is

It may have exploded nearly a thousand years ago, but the Crab Nebula is still spitting out radiation at incredibly high energies. In fact, astronomers have detected record-breakingly energetic photons coming from the object, clocking in at up to 450 trillion electron volts. Previously, the highest energy photon ever detected was just 75 trillion electron

Bathroom breaks on the moon? Forget about it. Astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin may have been the first people to set foot on the lunar surface when Apollo 11 landed there 50 years ago, on 20 July, 1969, but they had to forgo some Earthly conveniences in order to pull off the moon landing.

For centuries, scientists have speculated about the existence of life on Mars. But it was only within the past 15 years that the search for life (past and present) really began to heat up. It was at this time that methane, an organic molecule that is associated with many forms of life here on Earth