Artist’s impression of Cassini ending its life as a fireball in Saturn’s atmosphere.
"NASA/JPL-Caltech
Cassini is about to crash into Saturn to avoid contaminating its habitable moon Enceladus.
Artist’s impression of Proxima Centauri b.
ESO/M. Kornmesser
You may even be able to find other planets around the star closest to our solar system.
Most South Africans don’t visit places where they can learn about science such as zoos and museums.
Reuters/Siphiwe Sibeko
South Africans will not see the value that science and technology adds to their daily lives until there is more interest in areas of science.
Elenarts/Shutterstock
Researchers are looking at whether devastating asteroid strikes are predictable or random.
KELT-9B is the hottest known planet.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
Researchers recently discovered the hottest planet known. But which one is the coldest? And the biggest?
Gravity of a white dwarf star warps space and bends the light of a distant star behind it.
NASA, ESA, and A. Feild (STScI
Astronomers report the first ever measurement of light bending around a star other than our own.
A simulation of the latest binary black hole merger detected by LIGO. Blue indicates weak fields and yellow indicates strong fields.
Numerical-relativistic Simulation: S Ossokine, A Buonanno (Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics) and the Simulating eXtreme Spacetime project Scientific Visualization: T Dietrich (Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics), R Haas (NCSA)
Scientists have made a third detection of gravitational waves, again caused by the merger of two black holes. But they think there’s something different about the black holes in this case.
Artist’s conception of two merging black holes, spinning in a nonaligned fashion.
LIGO/Caltech/MIT/Sonoma State (Aurore Simonnet)
These ripples in the very fabric of the universe were hypothesized by Einstein a century ago. Now scientists have detected them for the third time in a year and a half – ushering in a new era in astrophysics.
Africa’s scientists are doing remarkable work.
Shutterstock
Africa’s overall contribution to research might be small, but smart people are undertaking smart and important work on and about the continent.
ASKAP at night.
Alex Cherney/terrastro.com
It used to take weeks to find any of these mysterious signals from deep in space but when the new telescope started looking it found one within days. Then another.
When black holes collide, gravitational waves are created in space itself (image is a computer simulation).
The SXS (Simulating eXtreme Spacetimes) Project
Einstein called entanglement “spooky action at a distance”. But now it’s been used to design an incredibly sensitive detection method for gravitational waves.
ESO provides new ways to access the southern sky for Australian astronomy.
ESO/José Francisco Salgado
Australia’s new partnership with the European Southern Observatory will give our astronomers access to much bigger telescopes.
An astronomer today is more likely to be online than looking through a telescope.
AAP Image/CSIRO
Science today is increasingly data-driven, but our education system has not caught up.
Almost every star has planets – so there are more planets in our galaxy than there are stars.
NASA Ames/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle
Plants on other planets are bound to be even weirder than the strangest ones we find on Earth – if they even exist.
The truth is we don’t really know if space goes on forever – but maybe, one day, we will find out.
Sweetie187/flickr
People used to think that when they looked up at the night sky, they were seeing all of space. Then American astronomer Edwin Hubble found out something so amazing, NASA named a telescope after him.
Saturn and its rings backlit by the sun, which is blocked by the planet in this view. Encircling the planet and inner rings is the much more extended E-ring.
NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
With the probe now on its ‘Grand Finale,’ a Cassini team member describes the amazing discoveries it made about the ringed planet and its many moons.
The Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope has spotted a new dwarf planet.
Michele Banister
It turns out that a common physical process called diffusion can explain the orbits of faraway minor planets – no need for a Planet Nine.
Artist’s impression of ZF-COSMOS-20115, a galaxy that stopped making new stars and rapidly turned into a compact red galaxy.
The recipe book for galaxy formation may need to be rewritten after the discovery of a massive galaxy that stopped making new stars early in the Universe’s history.
Yurri and Wanjel - the Gemini stars Castor and Pollux in the Wergaia traditions of western Victoria, Australia.
Stellarium/John Morieson and Alex Cherney
Many of the constellations we know in the night sky come from myths of the ancient Greeks. But similar stories are told by the oldest living cultures on Earth, including those of Australia.
An artist’s impression of some of the thousands of exoplanets discovered by NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope.
NASA/JPL
A Darwin mechanic’s success in the hunt for new exoplanets shows how amateur and professional scientists can work together on new research.