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...

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...

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...

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...

  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...

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...

  The two agencies are partnering on a satellite to understand the effects of different types of particle pollution on human health. NASA and the Italian space agency Agenzia Spaziale Italiana (ASI) are partnering to build and launch the Multi-Angle Imager for Aerosols (MAIA) mission, an effort...

    Dignitaries from the U.S. and Indian space agencies, along with members of the media, were invited to see NISAR’s science payload in a Jet Propulsion Laboratory clean room. It’s nearly time for the scientific heart of NISAR – short for NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar – an Earth...

Cambridge, Mass. – For the first time, astronomers have spotted an exoplanet whose orbit is decaying around an evolved, or older, host star. The stricken world appears destined to spiral closer and closer to its maturing star until collision and ultimate obliteration. The discovery offers new...