Scientists preparing to land the Rosalind Franklin rover in a few years are nervously awaiting the landing of Nasa’s Perseverance rover.
Artist’s depiction of a flare-coronal mass ejection event on Proxima Centauri.
Mark Myers, ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav)
We observed a powerful flare and a huge burst of radio waves from our nearest stellar neighbour, Proxima Centauri, indicating violent space weather around the star.
Considering what we know about the key ingredients for life’s formation on Earth, here are three explanations for how this process may have occurred on our sister planet.
Sometimes it is difficult to take a photograph of an exoplanet because the star illuminating it is too bright. Now there is a new ‘deluminator’ telescope that can block out the extra light.
K2-18 b is now the exoplanet most likely to be habitable.
Much of Mars’s surface is covered by fine-grained materials that hide the bedrock. The above bedrock is mostly exposed and it is in these areas that micrometeorites likely to accumulate.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona
It’s established Mars was once a planet with surface-level water. So with multiple MARS missions starting next year, the key to seeking out martian life may instead lie in the contents of its ‘dust’.
Realising the silence of outer space was what made us appreciate our precarious position down on this pale blue dot – so beginning our obsession with extinction.
The fifth episode of the To the moon and beyond podcast series explores where we will be travelling in 2069.
A Sept. 20 citizen “raid” on Area 51, a secretive military installation long fancied to hold alien remains, has drawn worldwide interest.
Fer Gregory/Shutterstock.com
As more than a million people have indicated plans to partake in a citizen ‘raid’ on the famed Area 51 to ‘see them aliens,’ a scholar on the search for extraterrestrial life weighs in on the hype.
Varied terrain on Europa.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/SETI Institute
Whether anything could live in Europa’s subsurface ocean depends on what kind of salt it contains. Now scientists have found out.
Relative sizes of planets that are in a zone potentially compatible with life: Kepler-22b, Kepler-69c, Kepler-62e, Kepler-62f and Earth (named left to right; except for Earth, these are artists’ renditions).
NASA
The ancient question ‘Are we alone?’ has graduated from being a philosophical musing to a testable hypothesis. We should be prepared for an answer.
Scale models of rockets at China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation’s booth at the International Astronautical Congress.
FOCKE STRANGMANN/EPA