Space Exploration News – Latest Headlines

MAVEN spacecraft's first look at Mars holds surprises

NASA's MAVEN spacecraft has provided scientists their first look at a storm of energetic solar particles at Mars and produced unprecedented ultraviolet images of the tenuous oxygen, hydrogen and carbon coronas surrounding the Red Planet.

October 15, 2014 Read more

Rediscovering Venus to find faraway earths

As the search for Earth-like planets wages on, a team of researchers may have found a way to speed up the process. The team is developing a new laser-based technology known as the green astro-comb to obtain information about the mass of a distant planet. Using this information, astronomers will be able to determine whether distant exoplanets are rocky worlds like Earth or less dense gas giants like Jupiter.

October 14, 2014 Read more

Inside the Milky Way

Is matter falling into the massive black hole at the center of the Milky Way or being ejected from it? No one knows for sure, but an astrophysicist is searching for an answer.

October 14, 2014 Read more

Mars One (and done?)

MIT team independently assesses the technical feasibility of the proposed Mars One mission.

October 14, 2014 Read more

Leaky galaxies lead researchers to better understand the universe

Focusing on large, star-forming galaxies, researchers were able to measure radiation leaks in an effort to better understand how the universe evolved as the first stars were formed.

October 10, 2014 Read more

Hubble Maps the temperature and water vapor on an exoplanet

A team of scientists using the Hubble Space Telescope has made the most detailed global map yet of the glow from a planet orbiting another star, revealing secrets of air temperatures and water.

October 9, 2014 Read more

Zeroing in on a source of gamma rays

Gamma rays are the highest-energy form of radioactive waves known in the universe. However, how they're made and where they come from have been a bit of a mystery. But now a team of researchers has made a discovery that may shed some light on the subject.

October 9, 2014 Read more

Hungry black hole eats faster than thought possible

Astronomers have discovered a black hole that is consuming gas from a nearby star 10 times faster than previously thought possible. The black hole - known as P13 - lies on the outskirts of the galaxy NGC7793 about 12 million light years from Earth and is ingesting a weight equivalent to 100 billion billion hot dogs every minute.

October 9, 2014 Read more

Dark matter half what we thought, say scientists

A new measurement of dark matter in the Milky Way has revealed there is half as much of the mysterious substance as previously thought.

October 9, 2014 Read more

Astronomers discover shockingly bright dead star

Astronomers have found a pulsating, dead star beaming with the energy of about 10 million suns. This is the brightest pulsar ever recorded.

October 8, 2014 Read more

Astronomers see right into heart of exploding star

An international team of astronomers has been able to see into the heart of an exploding star, by combining data from telescopes that are hundreds or even thousands of kilometers apart.

October 8, 2014 Read more

Solving the mystery of the 'man in the moon'

Researchers find that a volcanic plume, not an asteroid, likely created the moon's largest basin.

October 2, 2014 Read more

Space debris expert warns of increasing small satellite collision risk

The increasing number of small CubeSat satellites being launched combined with a relaxed attitude to debris mitigation could lead to hazards for all space users unless preventative measures are taken, warns a leading space debris expert.

September 30, 2014 Read more

Nitrogen fingerprint in biomolecules could be from early sun

Chemical fingerprints of the element nitrogen vary by extremes in materials from the molecules of life to the solar wind to interstellar dust. Ideas for how this great variety came about have included alien molecules shuttled in by icy comets from beyond our solar system and complex chemical scenarios. New experiments using a powerful source of ultraviolet light have shown that no extra-solar explanation is needed and the chemistry is straight forward.

September 30, 2014 Read more

Astronomers find 'cousin' planets around twin stars

Astronomers have found two new Jupiter-sized extra-solar planets, each orbiting one star of a binary-star system.

September 30, 2014 Read more

Simulations reveal an unusual death for ancient stars

Certain primordial stars - those 55,000 and 56,000 times the mass of our sun, or solar masses - may have died unusually. In death, these objects would have exploded as supernovae and burned completely, leaving no remnant black hole behind.

September 29, 2014 Read more

Turning the Moon into a cosmic ray detector

Scientists are to turn the Moon into a giant particle detector to help understand the origin of Ultra-High-Energy (UHE) cosmic rays - the most energetic particles in the Universe.

September 26, 2014 Read more

Earth's water is older than the sun

Water was crucial to the rise of life on Earth and is also important to evaluating the possibility of life on other planets. Identifying the original source of Earth's water is key to understanding how life-fostering environments come into being and how likely they are to be found elsewhere. New work found that much of our solar system's water likely originated as ices that formed in interstellar space.

September 25, 2014 Read more