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The predicted path of asteroid CAQTDL2 over the Philippines Catalina Sky Survey/ESA An asteroid hit Earth and burned up in the atmosphere just east of the Philippines. It was discovered by astronomers only hours before it streaked across the sky in a bright fireball, but went unseen by many on the ground as the view […]
Illustration showing NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft in deep space NASA, APL, SwRI, Serge Brunier (ESO), Marc Postman (STScI), Dan Durda We finally know just how dark it is in deep space. NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has made the first precise measurements of the ambient light that suffuses the universe, called the cosmic optical background. The […]
The solar system’s largest moon, Ganymede, alongside Jupiter in a picture taken by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft NASA/JPL/University of Arizona A massive collision billions of years ago may have dramatically reoriented Ganymede, Jupiter’s largest moon. Naoyuki Hirata at Kobe University, Japan, and his colleagues studied Ganymede’s extensive furrow system, a series of concentric troughs believed to […]
Boeing’s Starliner capsule carried astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams to the International Space Station NASA/Johnson Space Center UPDATE: In a statement sent to Jeff Foust at Space News, NASA said the sound has stopped, and gave an explanation. “The feedback from the speaker was the result of an audio configuration between the space station […]
JWST images of little red dot galaxies Josephine F.W. Baggen et al. (2024) Strangely bright galaxies spotted by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), called “little red dots”, may have more stars packed into them than any other galaxies we know of. The density appears so high that it’s unclear how the stars even survive […]
An illustration of three of the four satellites that make up the Cluster mission to monitor Earth’s magnetic field ESA – CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO A half-tonne satellite will be watched as it falls to Earth by scientists on a private jet, to understand more about how debris breaks up in our atmosphere. The satellite […]
Illustration of a swiftly rotating brown dwarf NASA/JPL-Caltech Dark matter-fuelled brown dwarfs could be lurking at the centres of galaxies. If astronomers manage to spot them, they could teach us about how dark matter interacts with regular matter. Brown dwarfs are vast balls of gas, between 13 and 72 times as massive as Jupiter but […]
The four crew members of the Polaris Dawn mission SpaceX SpaceX is getting ready to execute the first ever civilian spacewalk. Until now, every time a human has left their spacecraft to venture into the void of space it has been a government-trained astronaut – but the Polaris Dawn mission, scheduled to launch on 30 […]
Boeing’s Starliner capsule won’t shuttle astronauts home from space this year NASA It’s official: Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams are staying on the International Space Station (ISS) until at least February. This is a major setback for Boeing’s Starliner, the capsule that brought them there, but it doesn’t spell doom for the US space programme. […]
A mosaic of images showcases the star-forming cluster NGC 1333 ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, A. Scholz Astronomers have found six new worlds that look like planets, but formed like stars. These so-called rogue worlds are between five and 15 times the mass of Jupiter, and one of them may even host the beginnings of a […]