Space Exploration News – Latest Headlines

RSS Subscribe to our Space Exploration News feed

Astronomers unveil a distant protogalaxy connected to the cosmic web

A team of astronomers has discovered a giant swirling disk of gas 10 billion light-years away - a galaxy-in-the-making that is actively being fed cool primordial gas tracing back to the Big Bang. The finding provides the strongest observational support yet for what is known as the cold-flow model of galaxy formation.

Aug 5th, 2015

Read more

The ghost of a dying star

This extraordinary bubble, glowing like the ghost of a star in the haunting darkness of space, may appear supernatural and mysterious, but it is a familiar astronomical object: a planetary nebula, the remnants of a dying star. This is the best view of the little-known object ESO 378-1 yet obtained and was captured by ESO's Very Large Telescope in northern Chile.

Aug 5th, 2015

Read more

Cassiopeia's hidden gem: The closest rocky, transiting planet

A star in the constellation Cassiopeia has a planet in a three-day orbit that transits, or crosses in front of its star. At a distance of just 21 light-years, it is by far the closest transiting planet to Earth, which makes it ideal for follow-up studies. Moreover, it is the nearest rocky planet confirmed outside our solar system.

Aug 3rd, 2015

Read more

A cleanroom to sterilize space probes

Components used on a space mission must be cleaned meticulously. Fraunhofer researchers designed a cleanroom for the ESA (European Space Agency) in which the most infinitesimal contaminants can be removed.

Aug 3rd, 2015

Read more

New Milky Way map reveals stars in our galaxy move far from home

Astronomers have created a new map of the Milky Way that provides the first clear evidence of migration of stars throughout our galaxy. The study, which determined that 30 percent of stars have traveled across the galaxy, is bringing a new understanding of how stars are formed and travel throughout the Milky Way.

Jul 31st, 2015

Read more

Dense star clusters shown to be binary black hole factories

The merger of two black holes is one of the most sought-after observations of modern astronomy. The first observatories capable of directly detecting gravitational waves will begin observing the universe later this year. When these waves rolling in from space are detected on Earth for the first time, astrophysicists predict astronomers will 'hear', through these waves, five times more colliding black holes than previously expected.

Jul 29th, 2015

Read more

NASA finds first near-Earth-size planet in the habitable zone

NASA's Kepler mission has confirmed the first near-Earth-size planet in the 'habitable zone' around a sun-like star. This discovery and the introduction of 11 other new small habitable zone candidate planets mark another milestone in the journey to finding another Earth.

Jul 23rd, 2015

Read more

Brown dwarfs, stars share formation process, new study indicates

Astronomers have discovered jets of material ejected by still-forming young brown dwarfs. The discovery is the first direct evidence that brown dwarfs, intermediate in mass between stars and planets, are produced by a scaled-down version of the same process that produces stars.

Jul 23rd, 2015

Read more

Astronomers witness assembly of galaxies in the early Universe for the first time

An international team of astronomers led by the University of Cambridge have detected the most distant clouds of star-forming gas yet found in normal galaxies in the early Universe - less than one billion years after the Big Bang. The new observations will allow astronomers to start to see how the first galaxies were built up and how they cleared the cosmic fog during the era of reionisation.

Jul 22nd, 2015

Read more