Astronomy, Science | featured news

Spurred by the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize, 29 teams have signed up for a competition to become the first private venture to land on the Moon.

Gerald Kulcinski has a big problem. The nuclear engineering professor at the University of Wisconsin needs a rare element to fuel his research into a fusion reactor. But the cost of the isotope -- helium-3 -- is rising faster than a rocket headed to space. A few years ago it was $1,000 a gram, this year it is $7,000 and next year, well, he assumes it will be tens of thousands of dollars.

At $196 billion, the amount of money taxpayers spent during the lifetime of the space shuttle program seems astronomical.

When the United States embarked on its shuttle program decades ago, it set out to build a workhorse vehicle that would make space travel routine and beat the Soviets during the Cold War struggle for dominance in space.

The chemical building blocks that make life possible on Earth may have aged to perfection in asteroids, according to a new study.

Scientists analyzing bits of hardened lava from long-ago lunar eruptions found about as much water as in similar magmas on Earth.

A NASA spacecraft will reach out and touch an asteroid and send pieces back to Earth.

The Milky Way galaxy may be filled with millions upon millions of Jupiter-sized planets that have escaped their solar systems and are wandering freely in space, researchers said Wednesday in a finding that seems certain to make astronomers rethink their ideas about planetary formation.

Cosmologists Alan Coley from Canada's Dalhousie University and Bernard Carr from Queen Mary University in London, have published a paper on arXiv, where they suggest that some so-called primordial black holes might have been created in the Big Crunch that came before the Big Bang.

After working for half a century and spending £500m, scientists last week revealed that they have detected strange fluctuations in Earth's orbit. Space-time is bent and then twisted round our planet as it rotates, announced researchers with Nasa's Gravity Probe B project.