A defunct NASA satellite is expected to fall to Earth some time tomorrow afternoon but the US space agency has said it’s not yet clear where the space junk will land. The Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite…
A NASA spacecraft called Dawn has delivered fresh images of an enormous asteroid called Vesta, revealing new detail about the giant object’s turbulent past. A video made up of images collected as Dawn…
European astronomers have found 50 distant planets orbiting stars and 16 rocky “super-Earths”, planets that theoretically could support life. Expolanets, which orbit stars outside our solar system, were…
Recently my colleagues and I announced the discovery of a remarkable planet orbiting a special kind of star known as a pulsar. Based on the planet’s density, and the likely history of its system, we concluded…
Some astronomical questions can only be answered by looking at the whole sky all at once but the technology to do that doesn’t exist yet. Enter the new ARC Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics…
Astronomers have a rare new star that is just 27 light years away from Earth, making it the closest young star ever found. AP Columbae, as the red dwarf star has been named, is just 40 million years old…
Asteroid dust collected by a Japanese space capsule that landed in Woomera last year has been matched with samples of meteorites found on Earth, providing new clues about where meteorites came from. The…
A planet has been found in our Milky Way galaxy that may be made entirely of diamond. As reported in Science today, an international astronomy team led by Swinburne University’s Matthew Bailes, has discovered…
Just how big are the stars? Earth feels quite big, what with it taking an entire day to fly between Sydney and London, and clearly the sun and moon are quite large in the sky. But with virtually everything…
As of today, we have a cataclysmic new explanation for one of solar system astronomy’s most long-standing questions: why do the near- and far-sides of the Moon look so different? This new theory, published…
This morning, the discovery of Earth’s first Trojan companion was announced by a group of Canadian astronomers. The object in question, 2010 TK7, is a lump of rock just a few hundred metres across, and…
Welcome to the third instalment of If I had a blank cheque … a series in which leading researchers reveal what they could (and would) do in their discipline if money were no object. Today we hear from…
NASA has released photographs and audio of a powerful lightning storm on the planet Saturn that is eight times the surface area of Earth. The storm is so long it encircles the giant planet and its head…