Astronomy (RSS)

This floating ring is the size of a galaxy.

Seeing Saturn’s rings through a telescope can be an awe-inspiring experience. Now is a great time to check them out, says Abigail Beall

It's fun to scribble on the

The Egyptian-American scientist on falling in love with the stars, the problems faced by women of colour in her field, and her preventive double mastectomy Egyptian-American astrophysicist Sarafina El-Badry Nance’s debut memoir, Starstruck, offers a window on what it is like growing up to be a scientist today as a woman of colour. Nance, 30, is a passionate communicator of cosmology, and an advocate for women’s health, after a preventive double mastectomy. The book intertwines her personal story with explanations of what we know about the universe. Nance is completing her PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is studying exploding stars or supernovae. Isn’t this a young age to be writing a memoir? You still have so much of your personal and professional life ahead of you. It is, but I don’t think it means it isn’t the right time. It is immensely challenging and scarring to push through educational systems and institutions built for straight white men. There is a value in sharing my experience now. My hope is the book resonates with other young women, but also anyone who has felt othered or sought to belong. It is also for anyone curious about the cosmos. Continue reading...

While meteors are active from July, Perseids will be most visible in northern hemisphere this Saturday and Sunday Stargazers will be in for a treat this weekend as the best meteor shower of the year is expected to peak. The Perseids are named after the Greek hero Perseus because the meteor shower appears to come from the eponymous constellation. Continue reading...

An intriguing pair of interacting galaxies, M51 is

Tras un mes de junio récord, la NASA ofrecerá una conferencia de prensa a las 11 a.m. EDT del lunes 14 de agosto para discutir sus últimos datos climáticos.

On the heels of record-breaking temperatures in June, NASA will host a news conference at 11 a.m. EDT on Monday, Aug. 14, to discuss its latest climate data.

Every couple of decades Saturn develops a huge storm, and now researchers have found that the atmosphere keeps chemical records of those storms for hundreds of years

Students interested in designing, developing, building, and testing rovers for Moon and Mars exploration are invited to submit their proposals to NASA through Monday, Sept. 21.

Exotic stars may be scattered throughout the cosmos, from boson stars that could look like black holes to dark stars that might be powered by dark matter

On mission sol 872 (Earth date August 3) Ingenuity snapped

Virgin Galactic has succeeded in flying three tourist into space for the first time. They were former Olympian Jon Goodwin, Antiguan health and wellness coach Keisha Schahaff and her 18-year-old daughter, Anastasia Mayers. "You are so much more connected to everything than you would expect to be. You felt like a part of the team, a part of the ship, a part of the universe, a part of Earth," said Anastasia.

Virgin Galactic successfully flies tourists to space for first time

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A Soyuz-2 Fregat rocket carrying a lunar landing craft blasted off on what Russia hopes will be its first successful moon landing mission in nearly 50 years. The unmanned Luna-25's mission to the moon that is expected to take about five days and will seek to land near the south pole of the moon, collecting geological samples from the area. India’s Chandrayaan-3 space probe entered the moon’s orbit earlier this week, and will also explore the water-rich area near the south pole

Moon rocket blasts off, carrying Russia’s hope of first successful lunar landing since 1976

Lunar Codex: digitised works of 30,000 artists to be archived on moon

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The quest to discover whether or not we’re alone in the universe has become an obsession for many Americans. Some of them are elected officials, reports Adam Gabbatt in Washington DC Over the past few weeks, there’s been a lot of talk of UFOs. Which isn’t unusual in the US – over the decades, it has become for many enthusiasts a kind of obsession. But what is unusual is that recently this UFO chatter has gone beyond internet forums, YouTube channels and kooky podcasts. Now it’s arrived in Washington. In the past few years, the Pentagon has said pilots are seeing things up in the sky that they can’t explain. And a few weeks ago, spaceships got their day in Congress Continue reading...

The James Webb Space Telescope has made new observations of Earendel, the most distant single star ever seen, and it seems like it has a cooler companion star

Media are invited to Utah’s western desert on Wednesday, Aug. 30, to learn about NASA preparations and readiness to receive America’s first asteroid sample collected in space.

Six individuals were aboard VSS Unity space plane, including first mother-daughter duo to venture to space together Virgin Galactic’s VSS Unity, its reusable rocket-powered space plane carrying its first crew of tourists to space, successfully launched and landed on Thursday The mission, known as Galactic 02, took off shortly after 11am ET from Spaceport America in New Mexico. Continue reading...

Galactic-02, Virgin Galactic’s first mission to carry paying civilian customers to space, successfully launched and then landed in New Mexico

Cosmologist who explored the clustering of galaxies as a way of establishing the distribution of dark matter in the universe Between 1984 and 1992 the cosmologist Nick Kaiser, who has died of heart failure aged 68, created many of the ideas now used by astronomers to map the large-scale distribution of dark matter in the universe. His analysis of the clustering of galaxies and the distortion of galaxy shapes by gravitational light deflection are at the heart of the leading modern cosmological experiments, particularly the recently launched Euclid satellite. Kaiser’s research concentrated on the large-scale structure of the universe. Galaxies such as our own, the Milky Way, are congregated in a vast pattern of density fluctuations – superclusters that extend for at least 100m light years. All this structure probably represents the relic of primordial fluctuations that collapsed under their own gravity, generating galaxies and the stars and planets within them. We see these patterns in the clustering of the galaxy distribution, but much evidence tells us that the galaxies are embedded in invisible underlying dark matter, which dominates the gravity – dragging gas with it, which in turn forms into the stars of the visible galaxies. Continue reading...

The Luna-25 mission will seek to land near the south pole of the moon, seeking signs of water or its components Russia hopes to launch its first successful lunar landing mission for nearly 50 years, with a long-delayed takeoff from the far east of the country scheduled for early on Friday morning that the Kremlin aims to tout as a new achievement in space exploration. The Luna-25 mission will seek to land near the south pole of the moon, collecting geological samples from the area, and sending back data for signs of water or its building blocks, which could raise the possibility of a future human colony on the moon. Continue reading...

Galactic-02, Virgin Galactic’s first mission to carry paying civilian customers to space, is scheduled to launch from New Mexico on 10 August at 1500 GMT

Russia's first lunar mission in nearly 50 years is designed to land near the moon’s south pole and is being viewed as an attempt to show that the country can still compete in the international space industry

The Perseids are a major meteor shower - here is your guide to spotting them during their peak on 12 and 13 August 2023

This is a good week to see meteors.