Space

Cosmochemists discover water in fragments of an asteroid named Itokawa.   Impacts by similar asteroids may have delivered almost half of the Earth’s ocean water.  More than 332,519,000 cubic miles of water is present on Earth and 96.5% of this...

Researchers shed light on a mysterious black hole located 8,000 light-years away from Earth.  Typically, jets are ejected straight out from the poles of black holes, perpendicular to the material disc. This one is a unique case because the black...

Neptune is perhaps one of the most fascinating planets in the solar system, maybe because we know very little about this planet. Due to its immense distance from the Sun, it has not been visited more than once. The earliest known observation of...

Researchers created a mosaic of the distant universe, using 16 years of Hubble’s observations.  It contains 265,000 galaxies that stretch back to 13.3 billion years.  The universe is nearly 13.8 billion years old, which means the light we see...

Researchers detected the first kind of molecule formed in the Universe, using NASA’s airborne observatory SOFIA.  They found helium hydride in a very young and dense planetary nebula located 3,000 light-years from Earth.  The early stages of...

According to the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, people who fly beyond an altitude of 100 kilometers are recognized as astronauts. As of 2016, a total of 549 people have reached low Earth orbit (LEO), and only 24 of them have traveled beyond...

We may require new physics to better understand the expansion of the Universe.  Researchers used a new technique to study this expansion rate and found that our universe is expanding faster than previously calculated.  Our universe has been growing...

Uranus was the first ever planet to be discovered with the help of a telescope. But do you know, before Sir William Herschel, it was not recognized as a planet? When ancient astronomers first observed Uranus, they mistook it for a star. The earliest...

Researchers explore Earth-like exoplanets orbiting our closest stars.  They compared these planets with Earth’s evolution.  The findings show that life could be evolving at this very moment on some of the closest exoplanets.  Astronomers...

The word ‘Copernicanism’ refers to the fundamental theoretical basis of modern astronomy, first revealed in the early 16th century by a mathematician Nicolaus Copernicus. He formulated a model of the Universe showing that Earth and other...

Hubble Space Telescope captures a new active asteroid named 6478 Gault.  The asteroid ejected matter into space (between October and December 2018), leaving behind two long tails.  The debris from the long tail was captured earlier in December 2018...