Pretty much as soon as we understood what galaxies were, we realised they are all moving away from each other. And the ones that are further away are moving faster. In short, the universe is expanding.
The things you can do with an amaterur telescope.
Shutterstock/AstroStar
With a little bit of knowledge and a few pieces of equipment you too can look at the night sky and see it as a cosmologist does.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, left, welcomes his Iranian counterpart Mohammad Javad Zarif, ahead of their meeting in Moscow on May 14, 2018.
AP/Maxim Shemetov
New jobs and investment for Australia’s growing space industry are promised with the backing of the new space agency. It’s hoped that all states and territories will benefit from a national approach.
An artist’s illustration of a black hole “eating” a star.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
Eileen Meyer, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Astronomers are gathering an exponentially greater amount of data every day – so much that it will take years to uncover all the hidden signals buried in the archives.
Out there in space there is no air.
Cindy Zhi NY-BD-CC
When NASA first started planning the Kepler mission, no one knew if the universe held any planets outside our solar system. Thousands of exoplanets later, the search enters a new phase as Kepler retires.
The ISS sees us on Earth, but look up at night and you may see it, too.
NASA
A couple thousand satellites are orbiting Earth right now. Under the right conditions, your naked eye can spot these human-made objects in the night sky.
China’s Tiangong-1 space station is due to hit Earth, and Australia is in the crash landing zone.
Cindy Zhi/The Conversation
China’s Tiangong-1 space station is hurtling around Earth out of control and about to come crashing down. It’s just one of thousands of pieces of space junk left orbiting our planet.
Falcon Heavy’s first payload will be a Tesla Roadster, set to become the world’s fastest car following its launch into a heliocentric orbit.
spacex/flickr
SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy could propel two fully loaded city buses more than 50 times the height of Mount Everest at 32 times the cruising speed of a Boeing 747.
The time of moonrise and moonset and the shape of the Moon change throughout the month.
Marcella Cheng/The Conversation
There are plenty of astronomical things to watch out for this year beyond this week’s lunar eclipse, including new Moon landings and a space station falling back to Earth.
As long as clouds don’t get in the way, the view should be spectacular.
NASA Goddard
Dust can be instructive. The analysis of those collected around the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko provided new information on the history of the solar system.
A statue of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in Moscow, Russia.
Shutterstock/VLADJ
In the early 20th century a Russian scientist – regarded as the father of rocketry – made some novel predictions on where we would be in space in the 21st century. So how accurate was he?
Artist’s illustration of planet formation.
Image credit: NASA / Lynette Cook
The precious metal is literally extra-terrestrial, produced in the heart of the stars. How and under what conditions? Scientists know more thanks to a double astrophysical observation.