Space Exploration News – Latest Headlines

A young star's age can be gleamed from nothing but sound waves

Determining the age of stars has long been a challenge for astronomers. In experiments researchers show that 'infant' stars can be distinguished from 'adolescent' stars by measuring the acoustic waves they emit.

July 3, 2014 Read more

Sights are set on the Vela pulsar

The first data from H.E.S.S. II show the pulsed gamma-ray signal.

July 3, 2014 Read more

Martian salts must touch ice to make liquid water (w/video)

In chambers that mimic Mars' conditions, researchers have shown how small amounts of liquid water could form on the planet despite its below-freezing temperatures.

July 2, 2014 Read more

NASA launches new carbon-sensing mission to monitor Earth's breathing

The Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 soon will begin a minimum two-year mission to locate Earth's sources of and storage places for atmospheric carbon dioxide, the leading human-produced greenhouse gas responsible for warming our world and a critical component of the planet's carbon cycle.

July 2, 2014 Read more

A stellar womb shaped and destroyed by its ungrateful offspring

The little-known cloud of cosmic gas and dust called Gum 15 is the birthplace and home of hot young stars. Beautiful and deadly, these stars mould the appearance of their mother nebula and, as they progress into adulthood, will eventually also be the death of her.

July 2, 2014 Read more

Young sun's violent history solves meteorite mystery

Astronomers using the Herschel space observatory to probe the turbulent beginnings of a Sun-like star have found evidence of mighty stellar winds that could solve a puzzling meteorite mystery in our own back yard.

July 1, 2014 Read more

Hubble to proceed with full search for New Horizons targets

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has been given the go-ahead to conduct an intensive search for a suitable outer solar system object that the New Horizons spacecraft could visit after the probe streaks though the Pluto system in July 2015.

July 1, 2014 Read more

Rosetta's comet 'sweats' two glasses of water a second

ESA's Rosetta spacecraft has found that comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko is releasing the equivalent of two small glasses of water into space every second, even at a cold 583 million kilometres from the Sun.

June 30, 2014 Read more

Mysterious features on Titan reveal the moon's seasonal changes

Bright spots in a large lake on Titan suggest that Saturn's largest moon supports processes similar to Earth's water cycle.

June 30, 2014 Read more

Chinese scientists prepare for lunar base life support system

China is a step closer to setting up a lunar base after a 105-day manned airtight test, in which the bio-regenerative life support systems of Lunar Palace 1 sustained the lives of three trial volunteers.

June 27, 2014 Read more

Astronomers closer to proving gravitational waves

Researchers have provided another piece of the puzzle with their precise measurements of a rapidly rotating neutron star: one of the smallest, densest stars in the universe.

June 27, 2014 Read more

Revisiting the early Universe

In the first fleeting milliseconds after the Big Bang, the Universe consisted of a superdense soup of quarks and gluons that were hundreds of thousands of times hotter than the Sun. Over the next 14 billion years, the Universe stretched and cooled, leaving traces of the original brew trapped inside the protons and neutrons of atoms. Scientists are smashing atoms together at high speeds to liberate and observe these remnants of the early Universe and gain a better understanding of our cosmic beginnings.

June 27, 2014 Read more

China aims for rover on Mars by 2020

China plans to land a rover vehicle on Mars in 2020 and bring back soil samples from the planet a decade later, a top scientist with the country's lunar probe mission said yesterday.

June 26, 2014 Read more

Titan's building blocks might be older than Saturn

A new study has found firm evidence that nitrogen in the atmosphere of Saturn's moon Titan originated in conditions similar to the cold birthplace of the most ancient comets from the Oort cloud. The finding rules out the possibility that Titan's building blocks formed within the warm disk of material thought to have surrounded the infant planet Saturn during its formation.

June 26, 2014 Read more

STEREO maps much larger solar atmosphere than previously observed (w/video)

Using the Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory, scientists have found that this atmosphere, called the corona, is even larger than thought, extending out some 5 million miles above the sun's surface - the equivalent of 12 solar radii.

June 25, 2014 Read more

New NASA model gives glimpse into the invisible world of electric asteroids (w/video)

Space may appear empty - a soundless vacuum, but it's not an absolute void. It flows with electric activity that is not visible to our eyes. NASA is developing plans to send humans to an asteroid, and wants to know more about the electrical environment explorers will encounter there.

June 25, 2014 Read more

Trio of supermassive black holes shake space-time

Astronomers have discovered three closely orbiting supermassive black holes in a galaxy more than 4 billion light years away. This is the tightest trio of black holes known to date. The discovery suggests that such closely packed supermassive black holes are far more common than previously thought.

June 25, 2014 Read more

Curiosity travels through ancient glaciers on Mars

3,500 million years ago the Martian crater Gale, through which the NASA rover Curiosity is currently traversing, was covered with glaciers, mainly over its central mound. Very cold liquid water also flowed through its rivers and lakes on the lower-lying areas, forming landscapes similar to those which can be found in Iceland or Alaska. This is reflected in an analysis of the images taken by the spacecraft orbiting the red planet.

June 25, 2014 Read more