Space

Ceres is the largest object in the asteroid belt, and NASA’s Dawn spacecraft will arrive at this dwarf planet on March 6, 2015. Pluto is the largest object in the Kuiper belt, and NASA’s New Horizons…

What is hiding in the large disk of gas and dust encircling the 20 million-year-old star Beta Pictoris?  In 1984 Beta Pictoris was the very first star discovered to be surrounded by a…

Plumes that reached over 100 miles above the surface of Mars, reported by citizen scientist astronomers in March and April 2012, continue to puzzle scientists. In the past, similar events had…

Jupiter’s icy moon Europa puzzles astrobiologists and sparks the imagination of extraterrestrial life seekers. It is believed that the moon has a subsurface ocean of liquid water, where life could…

Most people don't realize it, but the majority of stars in our galaxy arrive in pairs. These fraternal twins tend to be somewhat equal partners when it comes to mass, but in a quest to find…

The Planck collaboration has released data from four years of observation by the European Space Agency (ESA)'s Planck spacecraft. The aim of the Planck mission is to study the Cosmic Microwave…

Yesterday, phys.org posted a story titled, “No Big Bang? Quantum equation predicts universe has no beginning.” Coauthors Ahmed Farag Ali and Saurya Das, “have shown in a paper published in Physics…

Some people believe we are in a new Enlightenment, with science making food plentiful and likely to make energy cheap enough to be unnoticeable in the next few decades as well. We share one other…

Spot the biggest star. Rutherford Observatory By Jillian Scudder, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Astrophysics at University of Sussex The universe is such a big place that it is easy to get baffled…

It was a hell of a ride to our hellish sister planet. Eight long years of studying Venus is way more than ESA scientists were expected from its mission. Venus Express spacecraft that launched on…