Astronomy, Space | featured news

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.

NASA on Sunday delayed Monday's targeted launch of the space shuttle Endeavour as work continues to resolve an electronics problem that scuttled Friday's launch attempt, officials said.

NASA officials on Friday scrubbed the planned launch of the Shuttle Endeavour for at least 48 hours after crews identified a problem with the heaters associated with the shuttle’s auxiliary power unit.

The idea that an ordinary person taking a trip beyond Earth's atmosphere is no longer fantasy. Private companies are soliciting passengers for commercial trips to space.

Think Mars today is a hostile place? It was worse 600,000 years ago, according to new research that suggests the planet had a dustier, stormier atmosphere. “It was an unpleasant place to hang out,” said lead researcher Roger Phillips of the Southwest Research Institute. He said Mars’ climate was probably a lot like the American Dust Bowl of the 1930s — but a lot worse.

Mark your calendars for an impressive and upcoming flyby of an asteroid that’s one of the larger potentially perilous space rocks in the heavens – in terms of smacking the Earth in the future.

A small piece of space junk drifted dangerously close to the International Space Station on Tuesday, prompting NASA to order the three astronauts to seek shelter in their attached capsule....

Evidence that there is life from beyond Earth has allegedly come hurtling through the sky.