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Like hurricane categories, a scale for atmospheric river storm severity could help communities around the globe compare and prepare. Atmospheric rivers – vast airborne corridors of water vapor flowing from Earth’s tropics toward higher latitudes – can steer much-needed rain to parched lands. But in extreme form, they can also cause destruction and loss of […]

African aviation started the year with the weight of COVID still hanging over it. After the emergence of the Omicron variant in late 2021, airlines had been forced to unwind their recently reinstated international flights, as governments added hotel quarantines back to the agenda in a bid to stem the spread. In mid-December, the UK

In a first, scientists have seen direct evidence of active volcanism on Earth’s twin, setting the stage for the agency’s VERITAS mission to investigate. Direct geological evidence of recent volcanic activity has been observed on the surface of Venus for the first time. Scientists made the discovery after poring over archival radar images of Venus

  The research uses archival NASA data to show that Venus may be losing heat from geologic activity in regions called coronae, possibly like early tectonic activity on Earth. Earth and Venus are rocky planets of about the same size and rock chemistry, so they should be losing their internal heat to space at about

We have long been fascinated with the idea of alien life. The earliest written record presenting the idea of “aliens” is seen in the satiric work of Assyrian writer Lucian of Samosata dated to 200 AD. In one novel, Lucian writes of a journey to the Moon and the bizarre life he imagines living there

The Exoplanet Watch project invites you to use your smartphone or personal telescope to help track worlds outside our solar system. More than 5,000 planets have been confirmed to exist outside our solar system, featuring a wide array of characteristics like clouds made of glass and twin suns. Scientists estimate there could be millions more

An international team of researchers under the leadership of Dr Florian Peißker at the University of Cologne’s Institute of Astrophysics has discovered a very young star in its formation phase near the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*) at the centre of our Milky Way. The star is only several tens of thousands of

Measuring the fuel supply on Odyssey, a decades-old spacecraft without a fuel gauge, is no easy task. Since NASA launched the 2001 Mars Odyssey Orbiter to the Red Planet almost 22 years ago, the spacecraft has looped around Mars more than 94,000 times. That’s about the equivalent of 1.37 billion miles (2.21 billion kilometers), a

  Every six months, NASA’s Near-Earth Object Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer, or NEOWISE, spacecraft completes one trip halfway around the Sun, taking images in all directions. Stitched together, those images form an “all-sky” map showing the location and brightness of hundreds of millions of objects. Using 18 all-sky maps produced by the spacecraft (with

Scientists have discovered a new source of ‘electron rain’ that is showering Earth with particles, a phenomena that could have a hazardous effect on satellites, spacecraft and astronauts. Rapid “electron precipitation” is caused by whistler waves, a type of electromagnetic wave that ripples through plasma in space and affects electrons in the Earth’s magnetosphere. Researchers