Space Exploration News – Latest Headlines
Subscribe to our Space Exploration News feed
A huge hourglas structure in the Milky Way
The first all-sky survey performed by the eROSITA X-ray telescope on-board the Spektrum-Roentgen-Gamma observatory has revealed a large hourglass-shaped structure in the Milky Way. These 'eROSITA bubbles' show a striking similarity to the Fermi bubbles, detected a decade ago at even higher energies.
December 10, 2020 Read more
Space weather discovery puts 'habitable planets' at risk
Stellar flares with a chance of radio bursts: that's the weather from Proxima Centauri. New research suggests exoplanets around red dwarf M-type stars will likely be exposed to coronal mass ejections, making the likelihood of finding life as we know it pretty slim.
December 10, 2020 Read more
A technique to sift out the universe's first gravitational waves
Identifying primordial ripples would be key to understanding the conditions of the early universe.
December 9, 2020 Read more
Researchers discover a new superhighway system in the Solar System
Researchers have discovered a new superhighway network to travel through the Solar System much faster than was previously possible. Such routes could be used to send spacecraft to the far reaches of our planetary system relatively fast, and to monitor and understand near-Earth objects that might collide with our planet.
December 9, 2020 Read more
Leaving so soon? Unusual planetary nebula fades mere decades after it arrived
When a previously typical star's behavior rapidly changes in a few decades, astronomers take note and get to work.
December 4, 2020 Read more
Supernova surprise creates elemental mystery
Researchers have discovered that one of the most important reactions in the universe can get a huge and unexpected boost inside exploding stars known as supernovae.
December 4, 2020 Read more
Astronomers to release most accurate data ever for nearly two billion stars
An international team of astronomers announces the most detailed ever catalogue of the stars in a huge swathe of our Milky Way galaxy. The measurements of stellar positions, movement, brightness and colours are in the third early data release from the European Space Agency's Gaia space observatory and will be publicly available.
December 3, 2020 Read more
Voyager spacecraft detect new type of solar electron burst
Astronomers report the first detection of bursts of cosmic ray electrons accelerated by shock waves originating from major eruptions on the sun.
December 3, 2020 Read more
A hint of new physics in polarized radiation from the early Universe
Astrophysicists have developed a new method to calibrate detectors to the light from dust in our Galaxy, thereby describing a new physics, with 99.2 percent accuracy, that may show parity symmetry breaking.
December 2, 2020 Read more
New research shows how ghost-like neutrinos helped shape the Universe
Computer simulations have struggled to capture the impact of elusive particles called neutrinos on the formation and growth of the large-scale structure of the Universe. But now, a research team from Japan has developed a method that overcomes this hurdle.
December 1, 2020 Read more
Earth faster, closer to black hole in new map of galaxy
Earth just got 7 km/s faster and about 2000 light-years closer to the supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way Galaxy.
November 30, 2020 Read more
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