The Euclid space telescope, launched July 1 on a mission to shed more light on elusive dark matter and dark energy, has reached its destination orbit and on Monday its European operators revealed its first test images. The star-filled snapshots were taken during the space telescope’s commissioning – a phase during which its powerful instruments

NASA’s distant Voyager 2 probe has sent a “heartbeat” signal to Earth after mission control mistakenly cut contact, the US space agency said Tuesday. Launched in 1977 to explore the outer planets and serve as a beacon of humanity to the wider universe, it is currently more than 12.3 billion miles (19.9 billion kilometers) from

Mitigating climate change on Earth is such a dire challenge that scientists are seriously investigating every single option they can think of. The latest idea is wild… but it’s not outside the realm of possibility. Astronomer István Szapudi, of the University of Hawaiʻi Institute for Astronomy, reckons we could catch an asteroid, park it in

It’s every space mission’s nightmare: losing contact with the spacecraft. In the best case, you recover it right away. Worst case, you never hear from your hardware again. On July 21, controllers lost contact with Voyager 2, out in the depths of space. Now they’re waiting for a reset to catch Voyager 2’s next message

Once in a blue moon, Earth’s skies host a ‘blue supermoon‘, and the beautifully bright sight is one that you don’t want to miss. Otherwise, you won’t have a chance to glimpse a similar phenomenon until 2032. If your eyes are peeled for a blue-colored Moon, however, you’re going to be disappointed. Despite the name,

Humanity has been on an asteroid-finding spree as of late. Those close to Earth, known as Near Earth Objects (NEOs), have been particularly interesting for two reasons. One is they offer potentially lucrative economic opportunities with asteroid mining. The other is they are potentially devastating if they hit the Earth, so we’d like to find

On a basic level, a star is pretty simple. Gravity squeezes the star trying to collapse it, which causes the inner core to get extremely hot and dense. This triggers nuclear fusion, and the heat and pressure from that pushes back against gravity. The two forces balance each other while a star is in its

New observations of the roiling cloud of dust around a baby star have revealed what looks like the early stages in the gestation of giant planets. By using the Very Large Telescope and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, astronomers have identified clumps in the thick material around a star named V960 Mon that could gravitationally

The search for alien life has always been hampered by the huge racket that Earth generates, rendering it difficult to tease out alien signals from all the local noise. But a new method for recognizing radio signals traveling through interstellar space could narrow the search considerably. “I think it’s one of the biggest advances in

Ancient grains of dust are revealing the life story of a Solar System asteroid. According to an analysis of grains collected from asteroid Ryugu, at least part of the carbon-rich rock started its life much farther from the Sun before ending up in the asteroid belt and then, ultimately, at roughly Earth’s distance from the

Astronomers have spotted a “once-in-a-lifetime” comet shaped like the Millennium Falcon – and sky gazers may soon be able to see it for themselves without a telescope. The comet, known as Comet 12P/Pons-Brooks, abruptly brightened 100-fold on July 20 as plumes of debris and ice were blasted off it into space. This gave it a

Our Solar System is a pretty busy place. There are millions of objects moving around – everything from planets, to moons, to comets, and asteroids. And each year we’re discovering more and more objects (usually small asteroids or speedy comets) that call the Solar System home. Astronomers had found all eight of the main planets

The biggest volcano in the Solar System could once have been an island in a vast sea, new research has found. When Mars was young, and soggy, billions of years ago, the colossal Olympus Mons may have resembled Stromboli or Savai’i, but on a much larger scale. A new analysis shows similarities with active volcanic

A power outage at NASA headquarters in Houston temporarily disrupted communications with the International Space Station. For the first time since the ISS became fully operational in 2009, the space agency had to rely on its backup control systems to re-establish contact with the astronauts on board, hundreds of kilometers above the surface of Earth.

A massive galaxy has created a rare distortion in the path of light that has traveled billions of years to reach us from a more distant galaxy. It’s called an Einstein cross – when the curvature of space-time around a massive foreground object splits the light behind it into four, like the points of a

One of the most interesting baby planet systems in the Milky Way has just yielded a detection of water vapor. And not just anywhere, either. In the extended disk of dust and gas that still clings to the star PDS 70, the James Webb Space Telescope detected the molecular signature of water in the region

A new observation reveals the ongoing effect humanity had after intercepting a chunk of rock drifting around the Sun last year. In September 2022, NASA slammed a spacecraft into the asteroid Dimorphos. Hubble’s latest observations show a giant swarm of boulders shaken loose by the impact, scattered like stars in the asteroid‘s wake. The new

According to our predominant cosmological models, Dark Matter accounts for roughly 85% of the mass in the Universe. While ongoing efforts to study this mysterious, invisible mass have yielded no direct evidence, astrophysicists have been able to measure its influence by observing Dark Matter Haloes, gravitational lenses, and the effect of General Relativity on large-scale