 Space
12 January 2012
Milky Way has "billions" of habitable planets
Working with data from telescopes located around the world, an international team of astronomers have shown that planets around stars are the rule rather than the exception and that there are likely billions of planets in our galaxy where humans could live...
21 December 2011
Earth-sized exoplanet identified
Two new planets - christened Kepler-20e and Kepler-20f - are the smallest yet discovered outside our solar system. Astronomers say one is the same size as Earth and the other about the size of Venus...
7 December 2011
Solar flares sandblasting the Moon
Solar storms remove a surprisingly large amount of material from the lunar surface, computer simulations have revealed, leading NASA scientists to speculate that solar storms may also be a major factor in atmospheric loss on Mars and other planets...
6 December 2011
Springtime on Earth II
The Kepler space telescope has identified a large, rocky exoplanet 600 light years distant with a surface temperature of about 22 degrees Celsius (72 degrees F), comparable to a comfortable spring day on Earth...
24 November 2011
Running the numbers on alien life
A multi-institute team of scientists have proposed a new method for assessing the likelihood of life on alien worlds (exoplanets) while another group is mulling the possibility that alien space probes might be residing in our solar system...
17 November 2011
New Europa fractured surface theory holds water - and maybe life
Taking observations of Earth's ice sheets and floating ice shelves and applying them to Europa, scientists say Jupiter's moon appears to have a vast body of liquid water located relatively close to the surface under constantly fracturing ice sheets...
11 November 2011
Lost: one giant planet
Computer simulations of the early solar system suggest the possibility that our system had more than four giant planets initially and that one was ejected as the solar system settled into its current form...
4 November 2011
SETI needs to see the light, say astrophysicists
SETI's quest to find radio signals transmitted by extraterrestrial civilizations has so far failed to locate any alien shock jocks, so two astronomers have suggested a new technique for finding aliens: look for their city lights...
3 November 2011
US astronomers give nod to complex organics in space
The controversial notion that complex organic molecules could be relatively common in interstellar space has garnered support from US and European astronomers' observations of a series of diffuse interstellar bands that were first discovered 90 years ago...
27 October 2011
Stars manufacturing complex organic matter?
Analysis of the spectral emissions from distant novae suggests that compounds of unexpected complexity - some resembling coal and petroleum - are abundant throughout the universe and are being made by stars...
7 October 2011
Energy levels of Crab Pulsar defy explanation
An international team of scientists has detected pulsed gamma rays from the neutron star at the heart of the Crab Nebula with energies far higher than theoretical pulsar models can explain...
4 October 2011
First images from ALMA radio telescope
The world's most complex ground-based astronomy observatory, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in northern Chile, has captured its first image - a pair of colliding galaxies...
16 September 2011
First exoplanet with twin suns discovered
The discovery of exoplanet Kepler-16b is the first confirmed, unambiguous example of a circumbinary planet - a planet orbiting not one, but two stars...
25 July 2011
Largest water mass in universe discovered
A reservoir of water that is 100,000 times the mass of the sun has been detected in a massive vapor cloud surrounding a quasar 12 billion light years distant...
1 July 2011
Space travel safer with shiraz
Intriguing new research suggests that the "healthy" ingredient in red wine, resveratrol, may prevent the negative effects of weightlessness that astronauts suffer...
9 June 2011
New class of supernova discovered
They're bright, blue-and a bit strange, say Caltech astronomers who are puzzling over the lack of hydrogen in the spectrums of a number of distant stellar explosions. Detailing the discovery in Nature, the astronomers said that six supernovae of this type had so far been identified...
6 April 2011
Strong evidence for liquid water in comet
The idea that comets are "dirty snowballs" frozen in time looks set for revision now that scientists have found evidence of liquid water in samples of the Wild-2 comet returned to Earth by NASA's Stardust mission...
18 March 2011
Cassini tracks equatorial methane rainstorms on Titan
Showers on Saturn's largest moon, Titan, have brought methane rains to its equatorial deserts, as revealed in images captured by NASA's Cassini spacecraft. The observations are the first of rain falling on Titan's surface at low latitudes...
7 March 2011
Discoverer of alien bacteria says life probably exists "everywhere"
A NASA scientist has sparked controversy with claims that he has identified bacterial microfossils in several meteorites. If proved correct, the implications are that life is widespread throughout space, and that life on Earth may have come from other planets...
27 January 2011
Hubble snaps most distant galaxy yet
Astronomers have pushed the Hubble Space Telescope to it limits by finding what they believe to be the most distant object ever seen in the universe - a mini-galaxy at a distance of 13.2 billion light years that formed only several hundred million years after the Big Bang...
20 January 2011
More evidence for asteroids creating life on Earth
All life on Earth uses "left-handed" amino acids to build proteins and NASA has now found that a greater number of asteroids were capable of creating these left-handed amino acids than previously thought...
29 October 2010
No shortage of neo-Earths
One of astronomy's current goals is to determine the number of sun-like stars that have an earth-like planet. Now, a new guesstimate from the University of California - Berkeley puts that number at a very high 1-in-4...
18 October 2010
New optics capture exoplanet 63 million light years distant
New optical technology has allowed an international team of astronomers to obtain images of an exoplanet in the Beta Pictoris system 63 million light years away...
20 October 2010
One-way Mars missions mooted
Fancy watching the sun rise over Olympus Mons? Or perhaps taking a stroll across the vast plains of the Vastitas Borealis? The only catch is you can never return to Earth...
30 September 2010
Newly discovered exoplanet may be habitable
Planet hunters have discovered an Earth-sized planet orbiting a nearby star at a distance that places it in the habitable zone, where liquid water could exist and human habitation might be possible...
25 August 2010
Astronomers detect distant solar system with five planets
Astronomers have discovered a planetary system 127 light-years away that contains at least five planets that orbit a star at distances that follow a regular pattern much like our own solar system...
3 August 2010
Sun-storm to hit within 24 hours
Sky watchers might get to enjoy some spectacular Northern Lights tomorrow, thanks to a massive explosion on the surface of the Sun that blasted a huge quantity of plasma directly at the Earth...
30 June 2010
Brewing a primordial broth on Titan
Replicating the atmosphere of Titan and blasting it with UV light has allowed researchers to create organic macromolecules that they think are a model for the chemistry of pre-life Earth...
23 June 2010
Expolanet's winds blow at 10,000 kmh
Astronomers have measured a superstorm for the first time in the atmosphere of the exoplanet HD209458b, where carbon monoxide winds blow at 10,000 km per hour from the hot day side to the cooler night side of the planet...
14 June 2010
Mars' missing water
Scientists have uncovered fresh evidence for a massive ocean that once covered a third of Mars' surface. But the big question is where did all the water go?
11 June 2010
Exoplanet orbit tracked
For the first time, astronomers have been able to directly follow the motion of an exoplanet as it moves to the other side of its host star...
20 May 2010
Anomalous supernova puzzles astronomers
Supernova 2005E, discovered five years ago by the University of California's Katzman Automatic Imaging Telescope, is a calcium-rich supernova that defies categorization, leading astronomers to speculate that it may hint at new and unusual physics...
12 May 2010
Intergalactic gas cloud could hold universe's "missing" matter
Astronomers have new evidence that a vast reservoir of hot, diffuse gas about 400 million light years from Earth could contain the "missing matter" of the universe...
29 April 2010
Discovery of asteroid water hints at oceans' origins
Scientists have detected a thin layer of water ice and organic molecules on the surface of the asteroid 24 Themis, a finding that adds weight to the theory that Earth's oceans resulted from an asteroid impact...
17 March 2010
"Fleeing galaxies" tracked deeper into universe
A new study of distant galaxy clusters mysteriously streaming at a million miles per hour towards the constellations Centaurus and Hydra has tracked this enigmatic "dark flow" to twice the distance originally reported...
2 March 2010
SETI needs to get real, urges new book
For the last 50 years, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has been dominated by a hunt for tell-tale radio signals. But a new book suggests bold new innovations are required if we are ever to hear from our cosmic neighbors...
25 February 2010
Astronomers cop an eyeful of giant planet's demise
An international group of astrophysicists have been documenting how the massive exoplanet known as WASP-12b is being stretched, distorted and slowly destroyed by its host star...
13 November 2009
Rosetta anomaly stumps scientists
When Rosetta swings by Earth today for a critical gravity assist, orbital data will be collected that could help unravel a cosmic mystery that has stumped scientists for two decades...
25 September 2009
Boffins ponder moon-water formation
There are potentially two types of water on the moon: exogenic, meaning water from outside sources, such as comets striking the moon's surface, and endogenic, meaning water that originates on the moon. Scientists suspect that the water that was recently revealed on the moon's surface is endogenic. Now, they are devising theories for how it formed...
21 September 2009
New explanation for gamma ray bursts
The traditional model for gamma ray bursts involves super-hot plasma that surrounds a black hole, but a new theory suggests that the jets come directly from rampant black holes in the process of devouring stars...
18 September 2009
Camera network plots meteorite landings
A network of cameras in the Nullarbor Desert in Western Australia has allowed researchers to track the fiery atmospheric entry of a meteorite and then compute the object's landing point and origin...
7 September 2009
Far out: measuring GDP from orbit
Measuring economic growth in developing countries is a tricky business, but Brown University economists believe the accuracy of GDP estimates might be improved by using images of nighttime lights as seen from space...
22 July 2009
Jupiter pummeled
Something slammed into Jupiter over the weekend, creating a massive bruise that was picked up by an amateur Australian astronomer on Sunday. Now, University of California astronomers have used the Keck II telescope in Hawaii to better capture an image of the moon-sized blemish...
13 July 2009
Neptune discovered by Galileo?
An Australian physicist has been studying cryptic annotations in Galileo's notebooks and believes the Italian astronomer may have identified the planet Neptune in 1613, 234 years before its official discovery date...
3 July 2009
Fermi Telescope reveals new type of pulsar
A new class of pulsars detected by NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is solving the mystery of previously unidentified radio-quiet gamma-ray sources...
10 June 2009
The strange case of the shrinking star
Betelgeuse, the bright red supergiant star in the constellation Orion, has shrunk by more than 15 percent over the past 15 years, and astronomers aren't sure why...
23 April 2009
Scientists mull polarized light tell-tales from alien life
Like life on Earth, extraterrestrial life should create an environment with a large amount of molecules that favor one kind of handedness (chirality), and now, scientists believe we may be able to identify life-harboring planets by looking for left- (or right-) handed reflected light from these planets...
18 March 2009
Extraterrestrial amino acids left-handed
NASA scientists analyzing the dust of meteorites say that the extraterrestrial biological molecules brought to Earth by meteorite impacts could help explain why the chemistry of life on Earth is left-handed...
9 January 2009
Newly detected cosmic noise hints at mysterious events in universe's past
Newly detected background radio "noise" that is louder than the combined radio emissions of all of the galaxies in the universe suggests something "new and interesting" must have occurred as galaxies first formed, when the universe was less than half its current age...
10 December 2008
CO2 detected on distant extrasolar planet
The Hubble telescope has detected carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a planet orbiting a distant star, a possible indicator of extraterrestrial life...
26 November 2008
Organic molecule hints at alien life
Scientists have detected glycolaldehyde (an organic sugar molecule that is directly linked to the origin of life) 26,000 light years from Earth in a region of our galaxy where habitable planets may exist...
14 November 2008
Exoplanets galore! Four distant planets imaged
It never rains, it pours. The Hubble Space Telescope and the Keck and Gemini North Earth-based telescopes in Hawaii have been used to capture images of four exoplanets orbiting distant stars...
6 November 2008
Force-field minimizes space radiation danger
Scientists have shown that a simple, portable magnetic field generator inside a spaceship should be sufficient to deflect the dangerous highly charged particles of the solar wind away from the spacecraft and the astronauts inside...
3 October 2008
Next-gen adaptive optics produce sharpest ever planetary images
A two-hour exposure of Jupiter using a next generation adaptive optical technique to remove atmospheric blur has produced the sharpest whole-planet picture ever taken from an Earth-based telescope...
24 September 2008
Astronomers mull planetary smash 'em up derby
Two Earth-like planets in apparently stable, mature orbits some 300 light-years from Earth appear to have recently suffered a violent collision, leaving astronomers scratching their heads as to what could have triggered such a massive event and questioning whether such a collision could happen in our own solar system...
11 September 2008
Gamma ray burst was brightest ever
Astronomers from around the world have combined data from ground and space based telescopes to paint a detailed portrait of a stellar explosion that was 200 million times brighter than the galaxy that contained it...
11 August 2008
Sol System "Pretty Special," Say Astronomers
Existing models that attempt to explain the formation of the solar system have assumed it to be average in every way, but a new study using recent data from the 300 exoplanets discovered orbiting other stars turns that view on its head and indicates that solar systems like our own are likely quite rare...
31 July 2008
Titan Moist, Say Cassini Boffins
Scientists using an instrument on NASA's Cassini orbiter have confirmed that at least one other body in our solar system has a liquid lake. The lake, probably composed of ethane, is 150 miles long and located near the south pole of Saturn's moon, Titan...
16 June 2008
DNA Precursors In Meteorite Confirmed As Extraterrestrial
Scientists examining pieces of the Murchison meteorite, which crashed in Australia in 1969, say that the nucleobases found in the fragments are almost certainly extraterrestrial in origin, leading them to believe that these important building blocks for DNA and RNA may be common throughout the cosmos...
6 June 2008
Moon Dust Could Be Key Ingredient For Giant Lunar Telescope
A cocktail of nanotubes, moon dust and epoxy forms a concrete-like substance that NASA researchers say would be ideal for fabricating a (relatively) low-cost mirror telescope on the moon that would allow the direct imaging of extrasolar planets...
5 June 2008
Line-Of-Sight SETI Revamp Proposed
Earth-based astronomers can detect extrasolar planets as they transit across the face of distant stars, so alien astronomers should be able to detect the Earth as it moves across the face of our sun. That's the logic behind a novel proposal to search for extraterrestrial radio signals in a tiny segment of the sky called the ecliptic band...
23 May 2008
Turbulent Times On Jupiter
Astronomers say that the increased turbulence and storms first observed on Jupiter more than two years ago are still raging, prompting a theory that Jupiter is in the throes of a major climate shift...
5 May 2008
Solar System's "Bouncing" Linked To Mass Extinction Events
A new computer model of our solar system's movement relative to the Milky Way indicates that it "bounces" up and down through the plane of the galaxy; a cycle that scientists say is a "beautiful match" with the mass extinction events that occur periodically on Earth...
17 April 2008
ETs Very Unlikely, New Calculations Suggest
The chance of intelligent life emerging on another planet is very low - less than 0.01 per cent over four billion years, according to a new mathematical model...
16 April 2008
Quantifying Space Radiation Dangers
Cancer researchers are working to estimate the risk astronauts on long voyages will face from exposure to the high energy radiation that is ubiquitous in space...
14 March 2008
Meteorites Spiced Up Primordial Soup
The organic soup that spawned life on Earth may have gotten some special ingredients from outer space...
10 March 2008
Brits Invite ET Over For Corn Chips
Snack food company Doritos is sponsoring a competition to beam a user-created advertisement (using a 2-billion watt transmitter) at a solar system 42 light years away from Earth...
7 March 2008
First Light For Binocular Telescope
The Large Binocular Telescope in Arizona has captured images using its twin, side-by-side primary mirrors together for the first time, achieving first "binocular" light...
18 February 2008
Plenty Of Earth-Like Planets Out There, Say Astronomers
Astronomers using the Spitzer Space Telescope now believe that at least 1-in-5 neighboring solar-mass stars in the Milky Way may form terrestrial worlds...
9 January 2008
An Inconvenient Galaxy
The discovery of two new components within a puzzling spiral galaxy confirm that it must have a pair of arms winding in the opposite direction from most other galaxies...
2 January 2008
Polarization Technique Used To "See" Exoplanet
For the first time, astronomers have been able to detect and monitor the visible light that is scattered in the atmosphere of an exoplanet...
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