Written by With reports of spectacular views of the northern lights on Thursday night, including sightings as far south as Kent in the UK, we take a look at what causes the phenomenon and how to catch a glimpse. What are the northern lights? The northern lights, or aurora borealis, appear as bright, dynamic curtains of colour […]
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The planet Saturn photographed with an amateur telescope Grey Zone / Alamy Stock Photo When I was a teen, I joined an urban astronomy club at my school. It wasn’t popular: most nights, it was just me and a physics teacher standing on a Chicago street corner haranguing passersby to look through our telescope. In […]
Engineers have worked out how to give robots complex instructions without electricity for the first time which could free up more space in the robotic ‘brain’ for them to ‘think’. Mimicking how some parts of the human body work, researchers from King’s College London have transmitted a series of commands to devices with a new […]
When a colleague sent John McFall a job advert for would-be astronauts, his reaction was swift. “To be honest all I had in my head was: ‘It would be awesome to go to space.’” Doing so, however, would entail shattering through a glass ceiling – one that has held firm during more than six decades […]
Starwatch graphic What on earth is T Coronae Borealis playing at? We’ve been on alert for it to explode since April, when we confidently expected it to go boom some time before September. But we are still waiting. The star is a recurrent nova. This means it actually consists of two stars: a red giant […]
Final preparations are under way to send a European spacecraft to an asteroid to discover what happened when a Nasa probe deliberately slammed into the space rock two years ago. The European Space Agency’s Hera mission will survey the impact site and make detailed measurements of the battered rock, Dimorphos, to help researchers hone their […]
The International Space Station with the particle-detecting Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer visible at centre left NASA The neighbourhood of space where the International Space Station (ISS) resides seems to be littered with unexpected quantities of antimatter – and the culprit may be mysterious dark matter particles. “We were very surprised. This is weird, and the mechanism […]
The massive asteroid that brought about the end of the reign of the dinosaurs when it crashed into Earth 66m years ago was not a one-off, researchers say. Detailed scans of an underwater crater off the coast of Guinea in West Africa suggest that it was created when another large asteroid smashed into the planet […]
You could be forgiven for thinking that this dramatic image is a still from a forthcoming science fiction epic, but it is actually the work of photographer Andrew McConnell, part of his in-depth series Some Worlds Have Two Suns – and it is very much of this planet. McConnell began documenting the movements of Russian […]