SpaceX’s Leaning Rocket Arrives at Cape Canaveral
The first-stage booster pictured above pushed the limits during SpaceX’s 4th successful landing last Friday with a speed that was…
Gaian bottleneck means alien life never persists, say Oz astrobiologists
Life on other planets would likely be brief and become extinct very quickly, according to a new paper by astrobiologists…
NASA discover Earth’s twin 1,400 light-years away
The Kepler mission has found the first near-Earth-size planet – called Kepler-452b – in the “habitable zone” around a G2…
Latest images of Ceres show detail of bright spot
New images of the dwarf planet Ceres, taken from 2,700 miles above by NASA’s Dawn spacecraft, show the surface of…
Stars can create DNA precursors, suggests new experiment
Scientists at Berkeley Lab and the University of Hawaii have shown how DNA’s molecular precursors – carbon ring structures with…
Mars astronauts will suffer significant brain damage
Scientists at the University of California, Irvine have been investigating what might happen to an astronaut’s brain during the long…
Search of 100,000 galaxies for advanced civilizations yields no obvious candidates
Using data from NASA’s WISE orbiting observatory, a team of scientists say they have found no evidence of the mid-infrared…
Mars may have liquid water
We’ve known for a long time that there is water in the form of ice on Mars. But now, new…
Rare spectacle of three moons transiting Jupiter’s face captured by Hubble
New images from the Hubble Space Telescope have captured a rare occurrence as three of the Jupiter’s largest moons –…
Tiny vibrations could reveal extraterrestrial life
Looking for life on other planets is not straightforward. Usually, chemical detection is used, but such tests are limited in…
Unusual carbon-based molecule detected 27,000 light years away
Astronomers have discovered an unusual carbon-based molecule – isopropyl cyanide – in the gaseous star-forming region Sagittarius B2. The discovery,…
Spacesuits get skintight makeover
To provide better freedom of movement for astronauts, MIT scientists are designing a skintight spacesuit that uses shape-memory alloys to…
Stunning photos of comet 67P at the end of Rosetta’s decade-long journey
After a 10 year journey, the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Rosetta spacecraft has rendezvoused with the 2.5 mile-wide comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko…
Locate alien civilizations by their pollution, suggest astrophysicists
Harvard-Smithsonian scientists speculate that little green men may not be “green” at all, and finding them might be a simple…
Could heat from a Martian volcano create a habitable environment?
The slopes of a giant Martian volcano, once covered in glacial ice, may have been home to one of the…
Space station experiment identifies microbes that can survive unprotected in space
Scientists conducting a series of experiments on the International Space Station say that some micro-organisms can survive for long periods…
Entire star cluster flung from distant galaxy
Astrophysicists have discovered an entire star cluster that has been ejected from the galaxy known as M87 at more than…
Newly discovered neighboring star as cold as the North Pole
Discovered using NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) and Spitzer Space Telescopes, a brown dwarf star only 7.2 light years…
New analysis reveals hidden planetary disks
The two images at top reveal debris disks around young stars uncovered in archival images taken by NASA’s Hubble Space…
Niacin: the vitamin from outer space
Niacin, or vitamin B3, could have been delivered to Earth by carbon-rich meteorites, say NASA researchers, whose findings support a…
Kepler mission identifies most Earth-like exoplanet yet discovered
An international team of astronomers have announced the discovery of a new rocky planet the same size as Earth that…
Wobbly planets could be best place for finding life, say astrobiologists
Pivoting planets that lean one way and then change orientation within a relatively short time period might be surprisingly habitable.…
Newly discovered dwarf planet hints at a much larger not-yet-seen planet
2012 VP113, a newly discovered dwarf planet (pictured) in the distant Oort cloud region of our Solar System indicates the…
Work by celestial archaeologists hints at Earth’s ultimate fate
For decades, astronomers have known that the atmospheres surrounding stars are often “polluted” with elements like carbon, silicon, and iron.…
Astronomers witness mysterious disintegration of asteroid
Using the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have witnessed for the first time the breakup of an asteroid into as many…
Solar wind creating interplanetary rain
Scientists have discovered that when tiny interplanetary dust particles are battered by the solar wind, the ion bombardment can free…
Water vapor plumes observed erupting from dwarf planet
The Herschel space observatory has used its far-infrared capabilities to capture a clear spectral signature of water vapor venting from…
Mysterious “hypervelocity stars” observed fleeing the galaxy
Astronomers have discovered dozens of solitary stars that are moving fast enough to escape the gravitational grasp of the Milky…
First exoplanet images from Gemini
After nearly a decade of development, construction, and testing, the world’s most advanced instrument for directly imaging planets around other…
Triple star system could reveal true nature of gravity
Astronomers have discovered a unique stellar system of two white dwarf stars and a superdense neutron star, all packed within…