Space Exploration News – Latest Headlines

Sun model completely confirmed for the first time

The Borexino Experiment research team has succeeded in detecting neutrinos from the sun's second fusion process, the Carbon Nitrogen Oxygen cycle (CNO cycle) for the first time. This means that all of the theoretical predictions on how energy is generated within the sun have now also been experimentally verified.

November 26, 2020 Read more

Galaxy encounter violently disturbed Milky Way, study finds

The long-held belief that the Milky Way is relatively static has been ruptured by fresh cosmic insight.

November 23, 2020 Read more

The distances of the stars

In 1838, Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel won the race to measure the first distance to a star other than our Sun via the trigonometric parallax - setting the first scale of the Universe.

November 19, 2020 Read more

In the mysterious Blue Ring Nebula, scientists see the fate of binary stars

Scientists have discovered a rare object called the Blue Ring Nebula, a ring of hydrogen gas with a star at its center. The properties of this system suggest it is the remnant of two stars meeting their ultimate demise: an inward orbital dance that resulted in the two stars merging. The result offers a new window into the fate of many tightly orbiting binary star systems.

November 18, 2020 Read more

Are there 300 million more Earths out there?

NASA estimates the Milky Way contains hundreds of millions of potentially habitable planets.

November 17, 2020 Read more

Astrophysicists decipher the Milky Way's family tree

An international team of astrophysicists has succeeded in reconstructing the first complete family tree of our home galaxy by analysing the properties of globular clusters orbiting the Milky Way with artificial intelligence.

November 17, 2020 Read more

Cosmic flashes come in all different sizes

Fast radio bursts, unpredictable millisecond-long radio signals seen at huge distances across the universe, are generated by extreme stars called magnetars - and are astonishingly diverse in brightness.

November 16, 2020 Read more

Solar system formed in less than 200,000 years

The formation of the solar system may be a long time ago, but it was not an exceptionally long process according to an international research team of planetologists.

November 13, 2020 Read more

Hubble sees unexplained brightness from colossal explosion

Long ago and far across the universe, an enormous burst of gamma rays unleashed more energy in a half-second than the Sun will produce over its entire 10-billion-year lifetime. Astronomers were baffled that the near-infrared emission was 10 times brighter than predicted.

November 12, 2020 Read more

Weighing space dust with radar

Researchers give radar new abilities using optical data about meteors.

November 11, 2020 Read more

Microbe mining in space

The first mining experiments conducted in space could pave the way for new technologies to help humans explore and establish settlements on distant worlds, a study suggests.

November 10, 2020 Read more

Has the hidden matter of the Universe been discovered?

Astrophysicists may have detected, for the first time, this hidden matter through an innovative statistical analysis of 20-year-old data.

November 6, 2020 Read more

Playing detective on a galactic scale: huge new dataset will solve multiple Milky Way mysteries

How do stars destroy lithium? Was a drastic change in the shape of the Milky Way caused by the sudden arrival of millions of stellar stowaways? These are just a couple of the astronomical questions likely to be answered with the largest set of stellar chemical data ever compiled.

November 6, 2020 Read more

Source of mysterious radio waves from space pinpointed

Three independent studies have found the source of a particular fast radio burst (FRB) - unexplained radio waves that reach us from space and last just a fraction of a second - helping to solve the mystery of what causes the strange phenomenon.

November 4, 2020 Read more

Microbial space travel on a molecular scale

How extremophilic bacteria survive in space for one year.

November 4, 2020 Read more

Galaxies have gotten hotter as they've gotten older

The universe is some 13 billion years old and is often imagined as just a vast expanse of dark, almost empty space getting colder with time. Yet new research shows that all of its clusters of galaxies are simultaneously getting hotter as they get older.

November 3, 2020 Read more

The farthest black hole from a rare family of galaxies

An international team of astronomers has identified the farthest example of a rare class of gamma-ray emitting galaxies. The so-called BL Lacertae object was discovered at cosmic dawn, within the first two billion years of the age of the universe.

November 2, 2020 Read more

Lighting a path to Planet Nine

The search for Planet Nine - a hypothesized ninth planet in our solar system - may come down to pinpointing the faintest orbital trails in an incredibly dark corner of space.

November 2, 2020 Read more