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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
Astronomers map space's icy wastes
Astronomers have made the first large-scale maps of icy material where stars are forming. In a challenge to conventional ideas about the formation of water in space, they find ice in regions with little dust or gas.
June 24, 2014 Read more
Archaeo-astronomy steps out from shadows of the past
This week, a developing field of research that merges astronomical techniques with the study of ancient man-made features and the surrounding landscapes will be highlighted at the National Astronomy Meeting (NAM) 2014 in Portsmouth.
June 24, 2014 Read more
Spectral 'ruler' is first standardized way to measure stars
A team of astronomers have created the first standardized set of measurement guidelines for analyzing and cataloging stars.
June 24, 2014 Read more
An Earth-size diamond in space
A team of astronomers has identified possibly the coldest, faintest white dwarf star ever detected. This ancient stellar remnant is so cool that its carbon has crystallized, forming - in effect - an Earth-size diamond in space.
June 24, 2014 Read more
New type of dust in Martian atmosphere discovered
Scientists have discovered a new peculiarity of the Martian atmosphere. They had analyzed satellite-acquired data and concluded that the dust particles in the planet's atmosphere can be of two types.
June 23, 2014 Read more
Mining the Moon: Panel at EuroScience Open Forum (ESOF) 2014
Who owns the moon? What kind of valuable resources does Earth's nearest neighbor hold? And how - and when - can we access them? All these questions will be debated today by a panel comprised of scientists, entrepreneurs and policy makers brought together by Google Lunar XPRIZE at the EuroScience Open Forum (ESOF) 2014.
June 23, 2014 Read more
Time to think big: a call for a giant space telescope
In the nearly 25 years since the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), astronomers and the public alike have enjoyed ground-breaking views of the cosmos and the suite of scientific discoveries that followed. The successor to HST, the James Webb Telescope should launch in 2018 but will have a comparatively short lifetime.
June 22, 2014 Read more