Latest Space science Stories

When you flip a light switch to illuminate the pages of your favorite book or reach into your refrigerator for that last piece of key lime pie, you expect the electric current coursing through the outlets to power everything from your lights to your nifty new big-screen television. When the power goes out, it can be more than just an inconvenience. NASA's Solar Shield experiment explores how timely space weather forecasts can help power companies keep the power flowing to the many appliances...

The first thing an alien race is likely to hear from Earth is chirps and whistles, a bit like R2-D2, the robot from Star Wars. In reality, they are the sounds that accompany the aurora. Now ESA's Cluster mission is showing scientists how to understand this emission and, in the future, search for alien worlds by listening for their sounds.Scientists call this radio emission the Auroral Kilometric Radiation (AKR). It is generated high above the Earth, by the same shaft of solar particles that...

For decades, astronomers have been blind to what our galaxy, the Milky Way, really looks like. After all, we sit in the midst of it and can't step outside for a bird's eye view.Now, new images from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope are shedding light on the true structure of the Milky Way, revealing that it has just two major arms of stars instead of the four it was previously thought to possess."Spitzer has provided us with a starting point for rethinking the structure of the Milky...

New scientific evidence suggests that deep inside the planet Mercury, iron "snow" forms and falls toward the center of the planet, much like snowflakes form in Earth's atmosphere and fall to the ground.The movement of this iron snow could be responsible for Mercury's mysterious magnetic field, say researchers from the University of Illinois and Case Western Reserve University. In a paper published in the April issue of the journal Geophysical Research Letters, the scientists describe...

The campaign to broadcast the first ever advert into space is launched today (Friday March 7) with University of Leicester space scientists playing a key part in the process.The British public is being asked to shoot a 30-second ad about what they perceive life on earth to be as part of Doritos "˜You Make It, We Play It' user-generated-content campaign. The winning advert in the competition will be beamed past the earth's atmosphere, beyond our solar system and into the Universe, to anyone...

NASA has selected a proposal by an MIT-led team to develop plans for an array of radio telescopes on the far side of the moon that would probe the earliest formation of the basic structures of the universe. The agency announced the selection and 18 others related to future observatories on Friday, Feb.15.The new MIT telescopes would explore one of the greatest unknown realms of astronomy, the so-called "Dark Ages" near the beginning of the universe when stars, star clusters and...

Mercury is the smallest, densest and least explored planet around the sun. More than half of it is virtually unknown. Insights into this mysterious world of extremes could shed light on how planets were made in our solar system, astronomers say. NASA's MESSENGER probe will be the first spacecraft to image the whole planet, making its initial flyby of Mercury Jan. 14 as part of a long process to settle into orbit. "With MESSENGER, many of Mercury's secrets will now be...

A new 11-year cycle of heightened solar activity, bringing with it increased risks for power grids, critical military, civilian and airline communications, GPS signals and even cell phones and ATM transactions, showed signs it was on its way late Thursday when the cycle's first sunspot appeared in the sun's Northern Hemisphere, NOAA scientists said."This sunspot is like the first robin of spring," said solar physicist Douglas Biesecker of NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center. "In this case,...

There are hundreds of thousands of asteroids circling our sun, all so-called "minor planets" left over from the formation of the solar system. Much about them remains mysterious. Solving these mysteries could shed light on the past, present and future of cosmic impacts on Earth. Among the puzzles: Missing asteroids There should be far more asteroids that resemble Vesta, the second largest body in the asteroid belt. The outermost layers of Vesta are composed mostly of basaltic...

HOUSTON - A team of scientists from NASA's Johnson Space Center (JSC) and the Lunar and Planetary Institute (LPI), both in Houston, and the University of California, Davis (UCD) has found that terrestrial planets such as the Earth and Mars may have remained molten in their early histories for tens of millions of years. The findings indicate that the two planets cooled slower than scientists thought and a mechanism to keep the planet interiors warm is required. These new data reveal that the...