Just as dust gathers in corners and along bookshelves in our homes, dust piles up in space too. But when the dust settles in the solar system, it’s often in rings. Several dust rings circle the Sun. The rings trace the orbits of planets, whose gravity tugs dust into place around the Sun, as it drifts by on its way to the center of the solar system.

New research provides evidence that galactic bubbles may be a source of cosmic rays.

You may have noticed that some weather forecasts have started mentioning the chances of seeing an aurora, also known as northern lights. Just as the atmosphere of the Earth gives us terrestrial weather, the nearby, vast atmosphere of the sun gives rise to space weather – triggering events such as auroras. Many weather institutes around the world now provide forecasts of the weather in space because of the hazard it poses to services we rely on, such as satellite positioning services, power distribution and communications.

A fiery Dragon lit up the sky over the Atlantic before cooling off with a watery splashdown on March 8. The SpaceX Dragon 2 capsule is of enormous significance for spaceflight as it has just become the first commercial vehicle to automatically dock with the International Space Station (ISS) and return to Earth. The spacecraft will now aim to carry astronauts to the ISS in a few months.

Scientists looking for signs of life beyond our solar system face major challenges, one of which is that there are hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy alone to consider. To narrow the search, they must figure out: What kinds of stars are most likely to host habitable planets?

This newly-confirmed exoplanet is a massive hot Jupiter that whips around its star every 3.85 days. From the surface, the star would appear 60 times larger in diameter than the Sun as seen from Earth.

On June 27th, 2018, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency‘s (JAXA) Hayabusa2 spacecraft rendezvoused with the asteroid 162173 Ryugu. Carrying on in the same tradition as its predecessor, Hayabusa2 recently conducted landing operations on the asteroid’s surface as part of the agency’s second sample-return mission from an asteroid.

Robot’s lightweight, high-power design is the perfect platform to share and play, developers say.

Remember Far Out, the distant planet at the far reaches of the Solar System, that was discovered in December, 2018? Well, it has been kicked unceremoniously off its pedestal as the most distant object after a short, two-month reign. In its place is the very newly-discovered FarFarOut (FFO.)

Since the Kepler Space Telescope was launched into space, the number of known planets beyond our Solar System (exoplanets) has grown exponentially. At present, 3,917 planets have been confirmed in 2,918 star systems, while 3,368 await confirmation. Of these, about 50 orbit within their star’s circumstellar habitable zone (aka. “Goldilocks Zone”) , the distance at which liquid water can exist on a planets’ surface.

On March 2, SpaceX plans to launch its first test of an unmanned Dragon vehicle which is designed to carry humans into low Earth orbit and to the International Space Station. If the test is successful, later this year, SpaceX plans to launch American astronauts from United States soil for the first time since 2011.

Shortly after the big bang, the universe was an energetic mixture of particles with strong mutual interaction. The first particles that managed to free themselves from this dense primordial soup were the neutrinos, the lightest and weakest interacting particles from the standard model of elementary particles. These neutrinos are still all around us today, but are very difficult to observe immediately because their interaction is so weak. An international team of cosmologists, including Daniel Baumann and Benjamin Wallisch from the University of Amsterdam, has now succeeded in measuring the influence that this 'cosmic neutrino background' has had on the way galaxy clusters formed during the evolution of the universe. The research was published in Nature Physics.

“It’s getting dark, my batteries are running low.” With this final poignant message, the most successful mission to Mars – originally planned to last 90 days – ended after 15 years, in a dust storm in June 2018.

Scientists have reproduced in the lab how the ingredients for life could have formed deep in the ocean 4 billion years ago. The results of the new study offer clues to how life started on Earth and where else in the cosmos we might find it.