The Pigeon Express
A high-resolution Iranian-owned satellite has been launched into space from a base in Kazakhstan on board a Russian rocket, amid speculation about its uses. The remote-sensing Khayyam satellite, which Iran has said it wants to use for non-military purposes, was successfully launched on Tuesday, according to footage aired live by Iranian state television. Earlier this […]
A popular stop-motion sheep is about to go from Mossy Bottom Farm to the moon. Shaun, the title character from the animated television series “Shaun the Sheep,” has been assigned a space on NASA’s Artemis 1 mission, targeted for launch later this month. The unusually clever Shropshire lamb will fly well beyond the moon on […]
One of the most powerful volcanic eruptions on the planet blasted such a massive amount of water vapor high into the atmosphere that it’s likely to temporarily warm the Earth’s surface, according to detections from a NASA satellite. When the undersea Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano erupted on January 15, 40 miles north of Tonga’s capital, […]
High-speed solar winds from a “hole” in the sun’s atmosphere are set to hit Earth’s magnetic field on Wednesday, triggering a minor G-1 geomagnetic storm. Forecasters at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) made the prediction after observing that “gaseous material is flowing from a southern hole in the sun’s […]
A third of Russians believe that the Sun orbits the Earth, according to a survey on scientific misconceptions published on Tuesday. The number of Russians that did not believe the Earth revolves around the Sun, 35%, had grown from the 28% that believe such in 2007, VCIOM, the All-Russian Center for the Study of Public […]
Part of what is suspected to be a SpaceX capsule has crashed into farmland in Australia, according to farmers and an astrophysicist. After being startled by a bang at about 7am on Saturday, two farmers discovered what seemed to be space equipment scattered across their sheep paddocks. Sheep farmer Jock Wallace initially called Australia’s civil […]
Debris from a Chinese rocket is expected to crash to Earth in an uncontrolled re-entry this weekend. The probability of it landing in any populated area is extremely low. But it has raised questions about how different countries take responsibility for their space junk. There have previously been calls by Nasa for the Chinese space […]
Scottish astronomers have spied what they believe to be the most distant galaxy ever observed, using the new super space telescope, James Webb. The red smudge is 35 billion light-years away. We see it, as it was, just 235 million years after the Big Bang. It’s a preliminary, or “candidate”, result and will need a […]
As tensions continue to grow between Russia and the West over the ongoing war in Ukraine, Moscow has announced it will quit the International Space Station (ISS) after 2024. The decision, reported by the Russian media, was announced during a meeting between Russia’s president Vladimir Putin and Yuri Borisov, the newly-appointed Director-General of Roscosmos, Russia’s […]
China has launched the second of the three main modules that will make up its planned space station, bringing Beijing a step closer to meeting the ambitious goal of having the orbiting outpost fully operational by the end of the year. The 23-tonne laboratory module called Wentian, was carried into space by China’s most powerful […]
There were 10 times more galaxies just like our own Milky Way in the early Universe than previously thought. This cosmic insight comes form one of the first studies of images captured by Nasa’s new James Webb Space Telescope. One of its authors, Prof Christopher Conselice from the University of Manchester, UK, said that Webb […]
A mysterious radio burst with a pattern similar to a heartbeat has been detected in space. Astronomers estimate that the signal came from a galaxy roughly a billion light-years away, but the exact location and cause of the burst is unknown. Fast radio bursts, or FRBs, are intense, millisecond-long bursts of radio waves with unknown […]