Dawn mission reveals Ceres’s ‘white spot’ persists
The latest image from NASA's Dawn mission has revealed the same unexplained white spot observed by the Hubble Space Telescope as far back as 2003. Its true nature is one of many mysteries the mission hopes to resolve when it sidles up to the asteroid later this year....
Sun fires off first flare of 2015
Not to be outdone by our terrestrial attempts to welcome in the New Year, The Sun has put on its own fireworks display. NASA's watching Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) took this image of a solar flare on January 12. 2015 is set to be another fantastic year for...
Astronomers use 3D printer to create model of the winds in Eta Carinae
Astronomy has always been at the cutting edge of technology. And now the worlds of stargazing and 3D printing are meeting, helping us understand what's going on in the most luminous stellar system for light years around: Eta Carinae. The system is comprised of two...
Chinese lander images Pinwheel galaxy from the surface of the Moon
I was blown away yesterday when I discovered that China's Chang'e 3 lunar mission has recently snapped this image of the Pinwheel Galaxy (M101) from the surface of the Moon. Taken through the lander's Lunar Ultraviolet Telescope (LUT) on December 2, it shows the...
Dawn spacecraft snaps Ceres
NASA's Dawn spacecraft is getting closer to the biggest asteroid in the asteroid belt every day. Also classified as a dwarf planet due to its round shape, Ceres is set to be visited by the probe next year. Dawn will start to make its approach on Boxing Day (Dec 26th)...
World’s largest telescope gets the green light
Awesome news in this morning. The European Southern Observatory (ESO) have approved the construction of the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) in the arid Atacama desert in Chile. Already home to some of the world's best telescopes, such as the Very Large...
Close proximity to red dwarf stars could scupper life’s chances
The search for life beyond the Earth is one of the driving factors behind modern astronomy. For a long time a debate has raged about the habitability of planets around red dwarf stars. This latest study adds fuel to those flames. Such stars are by far the most common...
What will future human space exploration look like?
I've just seen this beautiful video from Swedish artist Erik Wernquist. He imagines what our future in the solar system might look like and it is nothing short of spectacular. Carl Sagan provides the stirring narration.
Latest Planck data back up big bang
The team behind the European Space Agency's Planck satellite has released their latest set of data stemming from observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) between 2009 and 2013. What they've found strongly supports the prevailing view of how our universe...
New image of Comet ISON’s spectacular journey around the Sun
This year has been all about Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, the destination finally reached by Rosetta after a decade in space. But last year all eyes were on an entirely different comet: ISON. Some commentators were billing it as 'the comet of the century', set to...