Space Exploration

The Hubble Space Telescope is getting on toward the end of its useful life, but this instrument is still making breakthrough discoveries and setting records. A series of observations in 2016 happened to spot an unexpected object in the sky, and that object turns out to be the most distant …

Update 4/2/18: As predicted, the Chinese space station hit the atmosphere over the weekend. Specifically, Tiangong-1 reentered the atmosphere at 8:16 PM EDT Sunday, April 1. We knew the station would re-enter between 42.8 degrees north and south latitude, but the longitude was unclear until right before the end. The station ended up coming down …

In the search for alien life, astrobiologists have turned over all sorts of rocks. For example, Mars has geological features that suggest it once had subsurface liquid water. Scientists have also eyed Jupiter’s moons Europa, Ganymede and Callisto as well as Saturn’s Titan and Enceladus as possible havens for life …

The high-energy impact about 100 million years after our Solar System formed, resulted in the two colliding planetary objects completely merging to create the Earth-Moon system we have now. An international research team led by an Open University scientist has discovered that most of Earth’s water was present before the …

It has been several months since ‘Oumuamua’s discovery, but scientists are still puzzling over our first interstellar visitor. We’ve determined a few important facts, like it’s not an alien spaceship and it’s sort of cigar-shaped. Bigger questions like where it started out and how it got to our solar system …

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has seen its fair share of delays (and then some), but we had every reason to expect it would finally launch in about a year. However, NASA now says it needs more time to test the telescope before sending it into space. The latest …

Scientists have announced the first planet found to be orbiting a brown dwarf. It’s a significant discovery and a fascinating window into the evolution of a type of substellar object we don’t know much about. A brown dwarf — sometimes referred to as a failed star — is an object …

The brightness of a star naturally changes throughout its life cycle, but that takes ages and we humans are but a blip on the cosmic timeline. When we see a star’s brightness change, it’s an indication something of cosmological significance is happening. Astronomers have had a hard time figuring out …

China didn’t intend for the Tiangong-1 space station to last forever, but it also didn’t want the station to plummet into the atmosphere randomly. After China lost control of the aging space platform, scientists around the world set to work tracing its position to find out when and where it …

Our solar system has just the one star, but astronomers now have good reason to think a second star paid us a visit about 70,000 years ago. That’s when Scholz’s Star is believed to have skimmed the edge of our solar system on its way out to deep interstellar space. …