The fact of human existence is evidence that technologically advanced life is possible in the Universe, yet all our searches for other civilisations have turned up exactly nothing. Since Earth harbours the only proof of life we have, it’s difficult to know just how common – or rare – it is. A new method for

Curiosity has been through some challenges. A two-year mission that’s now almost eight years and counting, storm seasons, getting covered in dust… and yet the rover is still rolling around the Red Planet and making amazing discoveries. But sometimes, even on Mars, it’s nice to just take a break and look up at the stars.

For the first time, scientists have measured the lifespan of a neutron in the void of space. The margin of error means we can’t narrow it down yet, but once the technique is refined, it could prove to be a game changer. You see, when safely ensconced in the nucleus of an atom, the subatomic

A 2014 Mars photo that has strangely resurfaced in tabloids this month does not show a femur amidst the rubble of the Red Planet. Like all such photos to date, the object you see is just a plain old Mars rock. And NASA debunked it six years ago. The image was taken using the Curiosity

In July 2015, the New Horizons spacecraft made history when it became the first robotic explorer to conduct a flyby of Pluto. This was followed by another first, when the NASA mission conducted the first flyby of a Kuiper Belt Object (KBO) on 31 December 2018 – which has since been named Arrokoth. Now, on the edge of the Solar System, New

For the first time, astronomers were able to watch the entire process of a neutron star absorbing material and eventually unleashing a powerful blast of X-rays. Scientists have long wondered why neutron stars create these violent outbursts. This time around, it took 15 scientists from five institutes using seven observatories in order to gather the complete data

The NASA official who managed the inaugural private crewed flight into space last month has been promoted to become the first female head of human spaceflight, the agency said Friday, as it prepares to return people to the Moon in 2024.​ “Kathy Lueders has been selected to lead @NASA’s Human Exploration & Operations Mission Directorate,”

When Canadian astronomer Robert Weryk discovered ‘Oumuamua passing through our Solar System with the Pan-STARRS telescope, in October 2017, it caused quite a stir. It was the first interstellar object we’d ever seen coming through our neighbourhood. The excitement led to speculation: what could it be? There was lots of fun conjecture on its origins. Was it an

By this time next year, NASA expected to have a new observatory in orbit, one that would make the Hubble Space Telescope look like a kid’s toy. Unfortunately, we will need to wait a little longer for the next generation of stunning space photographs. The launch window for the James Webb Space telescope has been officially

Yet again, scientists have validated a major component of Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Specifically, a trio of two white dwarf stars and a collapsed neutron star demonstrated the concept of freefall, according to research published this month in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics. That’s the idea, famously illustrated by Galileo’s Leaning Tower of Pisa thought experiment, that gravity

Scientists have found a potentially habitable exoplanet and its star that are more similar to the Earth and our Sun than any other known planet-star pair. The planet – which is still considered a planet candidate until further confirmation – is the right distance from its star to allow for the presence of liquid surface

We’re pretty familiar with our Sun. We’ve even sent a probe to go study it; we haven’t done that with any other star. Given how closely we study it, it would be tempting to think of it as a typical example of a G-type main-sequence star, or yellow dwarf. New research suggests that this is

In the depths of space 3.5 billion light-years away, two supermassive black holes are locked in one of the most extreme orbital dances in the Universe. Their riotous, somewhat erratically flaring death spiral has been documented for decades. With new observations, astronomers have now characterised the way they whirl about each other in the centre

A comet only just discovered in December of last year has already met its demise. It didn’t reach perihelion, or its closest approach to the Sun. It didn’t even pass inside Earth orbit. Yet Comet C/2019 Y4 (ATLAS) has now absolutely shattered. In images taken on April 20 and April 23, the Hubble Space Telescope

It’s been a busy week for astrophysicist Michel Mayor. On Tuesday, he won a Nobel Prize for his work detecting exoplanets. Then, on Wednesday, he crushed the dreams of anyone hoping to one day colonize those planets. “If we are talking about exoplanets,” Mayor told Agence France-Presse when asked about off-world colonization, “things should be clear: we will not migrate there.”

The Moon is a pretty inhospitable place for humans. It’s all dry and dusty, and there’s no atmosphere for us to breathe. But there is a bunch of oxygen: The lunar regolith – the crumbly top layer of dirt and rubble on the Moon’s surface – is loaded with it. And now scientists have figured

NASA astronomers have used data from the Voyager probes to measure the bustle of particles rippling at the very edge of our Solar System, and discovered the pressure in the distant borderlands of our star is higher than they expected. The results suggest “that there are some other parts to the pressure that aren’t being

Some of the strongest magnetic fields ever detected in the Universe come from magnetars. Now, we might finally know how these strange objects form. Large and complex computer simulations, detailed in a new study, show that the collision of two stars can produce a massive star with a particularly strong magnetic field. As it eventually

A cosmologist who revealed that the universe was made mostly of invisible matter and energy, and two scientists who detected the first planet orbiting an alien star, were jointly awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday. By studying the earliest moments after the birth of the universe, James Peebles of Princeton University developed a

Space food is notoriously lacklustre, but new technology is slowly revolutionising the way astronauts eat. Whereas the first astronauts in space squeezed their meals from toothpaste-like tubes, today’s astronauts chow down on ice cream and fresh fruit, and season their meals with liquid salt and pepper. But there are still limits to the types of

In early September 1859, something world-changing occurred. Earth was wracked by a monumental solar storm, which lashed our magnetosphere with a coronal mass ejection, the like of which had never before occurred in recorded history. It’s called the Carrington Event, and it occurred right on the cusp of the Technological Revolution. It temporarily knocked out telegraph

For the first time, astronomers have obtained high-resolution images of a binary star system in the early stages of formation, and it’s more beautiful than we ever expected. Here on Earth, we’re used to orbiting a lone star. But out there in the wider Universe, most stars come with their own little star families, or

Saturn has unseated Jupiter as the Solar System’s most moon-bearing planet, the Carnegie Institution for Science announced on Monday. Scientists discovered 20 previously unknown moons orbiting Saturn, which gives Saturn a grand total of 82 moons, flying past Jupiter’s 79. The discovery unlocks a trove of possible new hints at how Saturn and its moons

Astronauts on board the International Space Station (ISS) rarely get a break from their cramped quarters. Only on occasion do they get to don a spacesuit and actually venture outside. This month, various mission members will get to do so five times. Over the weekend, NASA began a lengthy series of spacewalks to upgrade a set

According to the most widely-accepted cosmological models, the first galaxies began to form between 13 and 14 billion years ago. Over the course of the next billion years, the cosmic structures we’ve all come to know emerged. These include things like galaxy clusters, superclusters, and filaments, but also galactic features like globular clusters, galactic bulges,

From its red and rugged surface, Mars looks like a lifeless planet, both dry and desolate. But that hasn’t always been the case. NASA’s Curiosity Rover has now collected even more evidence of an ancient salty lake that once lapped the edges of the Gale crater some 3.7 billion years ago. Analysing soil samples collected

When China’s Chang’e-4 spacecraft landed on the lunar far side on 3 January 2019, it made history. It was the first spacecraft to visit that part of the Moon, and among its payload was a 2.6 kg (5.7 lb) mini-biosphere called the Lunar Micro Ecosystem (LME). The sealed, cylindrical biosphere is only 18 cm (7.1

In a death-defying maneuver for the spacecraft, NASA’s Juno has completed an unprecedented and unplanned engine burn. The purpose? To save the spacecraft’s ‘life’, or at least the rest of its mission to Jupiter. Jupiter casts a deep, dark shadow. Dark enough, in fact, to effectively kill Juno if it flies through it. Rather than

Just less than 13,000 years ago, the climate cooled for a short while in many parts of the world, especially in the northern hemisphere. We know this because of what has been found in ice cores drilled in Greenland, as well as from oceans around the world. Grains of pollen from various plants can also

The centre of the Milky Way galaxy is a relatively calm place now (compared to other galactic centres), but that hasn’t always been the case. In fact, just 3.5 million years ago, it was positively riotous – expelling a burst of energy that eventually blasted 200,000 light-years above and below the galactic plane. The shockwaves

In April, an international team of scientists captured the first-ever photo of a black hole. In September, they won a US$3 million Breakthrough Prize for that accomplishment. But they’re far from finished. Next, the team behind the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) is planning a cinematic debut. The subject: the supermassive black hole at the centre of our

According to local news reports in Chile, something was seen blazing a trail across the sky over the island of Chiloé last Wednesday. Naturally, with several small fires appearing soon after the sightings, some residents concluded the two events were linked. But experts have now ruled if what people saw was a meteorite, the space

Astronomers across the globe were quick to begin studying 2I/Borisov – the second known interstellar object to visit our solar system – almost immediately upon its detection in August. Those observations are already yielding fascinating insights into the comet – including the fact that its solar system of origin might not be that different from

After counting all the normal, luminous matter in the obvious places of the universe – galaxies, clusters of galaxies and the intergalactic medium – about half of it is still missing. So not only is 85 percent of the matter in the universe made up of an unknown, invisible substance dubbed “dark matter”, we can’t

When a single neutrino was detected by a neutrino detector in Antarctica in September 2017, it was the start of something amazing. It was to become the first-ever high-energy neutrino that astronomers could trace back to an origin – a blazar galaxy called TXS 0506+056, 3.8 billion light-years away. But, in the manner of many

Scientists just found the most basic ingredients for life bursting from an ocean on Saturn’s moon Enceladus. A new analysis of NASA data reveals the presence of organic compounds in the plumes of liquid water that shoot into space from the ocean below Enceladus’s icy crust. These compounds, which carry nitrogen and oxygen, play a

NASA’s Mars InSight lander has detected some “peculiar sounds,” thanks to an onboard seismometer that’s capable of picking up the tiniest of vibrations. The InSight team found that delicate parts inside the seismometer itself were expanding and contracting, causing “dinks and donks” – the team’s nickname for strange mechanical sounds – to show up in

Our next-door neighbour is a cannibal. In its distant past, the Andromeda galaxy has devoured at least two other galaxies, subsuming their stars into its galactic halo. And now, for the first time, astronomers have identified those stars, tracking them to individual galactic mergers billions of years ago. It shouldn’t come as a tremendous surprise.

We have a new record. Perhaps 1,060 light-years away, a gas giant called NGTS-10b is whipping around its star so closely, it completes an entire orbit in just 18.4 hours. That’s nearly as close as the planet can get to the host star without being ripped apart by gravitational forces. But it will get closer.

They’re called ‘lurkers’, and they may have been covertly surveilling us from space for millions of years – since before we even existed, perhaps. That’s the bold proposal being made in a new scientific paper by American physicist James Benford. But even though Benford’s ideas sound radical, they draw upon a long history of conjecture

What do you imagine the first settlers on Mars will look like? Maybe they’ll be the best and brightest our world has to offer: people from countries around the world with multiple degrees and decades of training in astrophysics. Or maybe the first Earthlings on Mars will be a bunch of microbes. A paper published

Time, as far as we know, moves only in one direction. But last year, researchers found events in some gamma-ray burst pulses that seemed to repeat themselves as though they were going backwards in time. Now, new research suggests a potential answer for what might be causing this time reversibility effect. If waves within the

At the edge of our Solar System, some unknown object is manipulating the paths of chunks of ice as they circle the Sun. These objects’ oval-shaped orbits all point in the same direction and tilt the same way, suggesting that an unseen force is herding them. At first, scientists thought the culprit was a mysterious

Elon Musk, the founder and CEO of SpaceX, addressed planet Earth on Saturday night about his latest plans to “extend consciousness beyond Earth” using a towering steel spaceship. Standing between two rockets that represented both the future of SpaceX and its nail-biting past, Musk delivered his talk to more than 100 people from the company’s

Astronomers have spotted three supermassive black holes (SMBHs) at the center of three colliding galaxies a billion light years away from Earth. That alone is unusual, but the three black holes are also glowing in x-ray emissions. This is evidence that all three are also active galactic nuclei (AGN,) gobbling up material and flaring brightly.

For all our perception of supermassive black holes as gravitational vortices ravenously devouring stars, it doesn’t actually happen that often. For instance, our galaxy’s own black hole might only do it a handful of times every 100,000 years. So it’s quite a special occasion for the astronomers who have just observed the immediate aftermath of

These days we’re used to jaw-dropping photos getting snapped from the International Space Station, but the latest one NASA astronaut Christina Koch recently posted to Twitter comes with a special message, too. The image shows the Soyuz MS-15 spaceflight taking three people to the ISS: Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Skripochka and NASA astronaut Jessica Meir as part

The first-ever direct image of a black hole‘s event horizon was a truly impressive feat of scientific ingenuity. But it was extremely difficult to achieve, and the resulting image was relatively low-resolution. Techniques and technology will be refined, and it’s expected that future direct images of black holes will improve with time. And a new