Astronomy

As it heads out of the solar system never to return, the deep space probe Voyager 1 is headed for yet another cosmic milestone. In late 2026, it will become the first spacecraft to travel so far that a radio signal from Earth takes 24 hours, or one light day, to reach it.

Sierra Space and NASA have renegotiated their contract for the Dream Chaser spaceplane that will allow the spacecraft to make its first orbital flight next year as a free flier instead of visiting the International Space Station (ISS).

NASA's beleaguered Mars Sample Return mission may get a reprieve from an unexpected source. Lockheed Martin has proposed a streamlined, lower-cost alternative that could slash the mission’s price tag by more than half.

Three years ago, a single “ghost particle” soared into the Mediterranean with more energy than any ever observed before. Now, a team of researchers in Italy claims the particle may have originated in a specific class of blazars.

New research is offering a dramatic new way to read Dante Alighieri’s Inferno: not simply as a religious vision of Hell, but as an early attempt to imagine the effects of a catastrophic planetary impact.

By determining the ages of more than 100,000 giant stars, researchers have identified the edge of our galaxy's star-forming disc for the first time, revealing that the most recent star formation is closer to the center than we expected.

We're a step closer to understanding how energy is spread across the Universe, with the most detailed map of intergalactic magnetism ever produced. It's more than five times larger than all earlier surveys combined.

A pair of stars spiralling around each other. That’s the origin of a new source of repeating radio bursts we’ve detected, called ASKAP J1745.

A recent analysis by a team of researchers from Poland and the US points to a surprising new method for world-building, one that could generate some of the largest populations of planets in the Universe.

Observations of a far-distant galaxy several times the size of the Milky Way reveal a surprising stillness overcoming the sea of early stars, suggesting mysterious forces brought its rotation to a rather rapid halt.

A newly observed planetary system, dubbed TOI-201, has revealed orbits that change in real time observable in human timescales.

If you had to name the most dangerous place in the Solar System, you’d probably start with the obvious suspects: the Sun, Venus, and a little moon of Jupiter's. In reality, you could get in real trouble far closer to home.

The floor is literally lava on a nearby exoplanet, new telescope observations show. Given its small size and strange history, L 98-59 d’s molten ocean and odd atmosphere might represent an entirely new category of extraterrestrial world.

For the first time, astronomers claim they’ve found a way to reconstruct a galaxy’s entire ‘life story’ – from a single snapshot in time.

The Artemis II mission, which will return US astronauts to lunar space, has run into problems that have critics demanding NASA remove the crew from the flight for safety reasons. The bigger question is, why do we have astronauts at all?

Why did the ice ages occur? If you need a scapegoat, a new study by Stephen Kane of UC Riverside suggests pointing the finger at Mars. According to computer models, the pull of the Red Planet may have altered the Earth's orbit until things got nippy.

According to NASA, Saturn's moon Titan may be the most fantastically large slushie of all time. Based on a reexamination of data from the Cassini probe collected in 2012, the moon's long-suspected global ocean may actually be a slurry of ice and rock.

One of the big challenges in building a space rover is ensuring it doesn't break down out there. Aerospace engineers have designed a flexible wheel for rovers that doesn't require an air-filled tube, can change its size, and can take a real beating.