Direction is something we humans are pretty accustomed to. Living in our friendly terrestrial environment, we are used to seeing things in term of up and down, left and right, forwards or backwards. And to us, our frame of reference is fixed and doesn’t change, unless we move or are in the process of moving. But when it comes to cosmology, things get a little more complicated.

Sixty-five million years ago, disaster struck the Earth. An asteroid or comet around 10km in diameter slammed into what is now the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. While the idea was ridiculed at first, this event is now widely believed to be the reason the dinosaurs became extinct.

Mars’ natural satellites – Phobos and Deimos – have been a mystery since they were first discovered. While it is widely believed that they are former asteroids that were captured by Mars’ gravity, this remains unproven. And while some of Phobos’ surface features are known to be the result of Mars’ gravity, the origin of its linear grooves and crater chains (catenae) have remained unknown.

For almost a century, astronomers and cosmologists have postulated that space is filled with an invisible mass known as “dark matter”. Accounting for 27% of the mass and energy in the observable universe, the existence of this matter was intended to explain all the “missing” baryonic matter in cosmological models. Unfortunately, the concept of dark matter has solved one cosmological problem, only to create another.

For millennia, human beings stared up at the night sky and were held in awe by the Moon. To many ancient cultures, it represented a deity, and its cycles were accorded divine significance. By the time of Classical Antiquity and the Middle Ages, the Moon was considered to be a heavenly body that orbited Earth, much like the other known planets of the day (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn).

Back in April, Russian billionaire Yuri Milner and famed cosmologist Stephen Hawking unveiled Project Starshot. As the latest venture by Breakthrough Initiatives, Starshot was conceived with the aims of sending a tiny spacecraft to the neighboring star system Alpha Centauri in the coming decades.

Many scientists believe that alien civilisations exist. For them, the question is now whether we will encounter them in the near future or a very long time from now, rather than if at all. So let’s imagine that we suddenly stand face-to-face with members of an alien species. What would we do first? Surely communicating that we come in peace would be a priority. But would we ever be able to understand each other?

Beyond the orbit of Neptune, the farthest recognized-planet from our Sun, lies the mysteries population known as the Trans-Neptunian Object (TNOs). For years, astronomers have been discovering bodies and minor planets in this region which are influenced by Neptune’s gravity, and orbit our Sun at an average distance of 30 Astronomical Units.

When talking about the most interesting place in our solar system outside of earth, Europa usually comes op very quickly. Over the years there have been many attempts to create a mission to this mysterious moon. These attempts have always been struck down... Until now.

These days, we’re used to seeing pictures of planets sent back by spacecraft. Some pictures look colourful, others less so. But do they show what each planet really looks like?

There is something strange happening in the local universe, with galaxies moving away from each other faster than expected. What is driving this expansion?

Around four decades ago, astronomers became aware that our galaxy, the Milky Way, was moving through space at a much faster rate than expected. At 2.2-million kilometres an hour, the speed of the Milky Way through the Cosmos is 2,500 times faster than a cruising airliner; 55 times more than the escape velocity from Earth; and a factor of two greater than even the galaxy’s own escape velocity! But where this motion comes from is a mystery.