Astronomy, Space | featured news

It sounds like the plot of a bad Bruce Willis movie, but some experts are saying it should be a reality. In order to prepare for massive asteroids that could aim for Earth in the future, researchers should ram a spaceship into a real asteroid to see if the space rock would shift course, scientists say.

Attention wealthy nations and billionaires: A team of former NASA executives will fly you to the moon in an out-of-this-world commercial venture combining the wizardry of Apollo and the marketing of Apple. For a mere $1.5 billion, the business is offering countries the chance to send two people to the moon and back, either for research or national prestige. And if you are an individual with that kind of money to spare, you too can go the moon for a couple days.

That wonder molecule of life on Earth, DNA, is now being enlisted in the search for an exotic species zooming through the cosmos: dark matter... As far back as the 1930s, astronomers watching distant galaxies saw that something was missing: There were not enough stars to account for the heavy gravity needed to whirl galaxies so quickly or smash them together so swiftly.

The Voyager 1 spacecraft is traveling through a previously unknown region of deep space as it heads out of our solar system, which might happen soon, scientists reported Monday. Voyage and its twin, Voyager 2, were launched in 1977 and will become the first man-made objects to exit our celestial neighborhood -- relatively soon.

Science editor Alan Boyle's blog: Although NASA's Curiosity rover hasn't yet confirmed the detection of organic compounds on Mars, it's already seeing that the Red Planet's soil contains complex chemicals, including perchlorate.

Just in time for Christmas, scientists have confirmed a vast amount of ice at the north pole - on Mercury, the closest planet to the sun....

NASA and Russia's Roscosmos have named the two men who will spend a year aboard the International Space Station to gather more data about the effects of weightlessness on humans....

Astronomers have obtained an important first look at the dwarf planet Makemake - finding it has no atmosphere. One of five such dwarfs in our Solar System including former planet Pluto, Makemake had until now eluded study. But in April 2011, it passed between the Earth and a distant star, and astronomers used seven telescopes to study how the star's light was changed.

There’s an orphan planet roaming our galactic neighborhood. It’s a globe of gas about the size of Jupiter, astronomers say. And it’s out there by its lonesome, untethered to any star, drifting about 100 light-years from Earth. (In astronomical terms, that’s close.)

Five Harvard students send the first hamburger into space.