Science

A large metal ring and sphere that villagers in rural western India said fell from the sky over the weekend could be from a Chinese rocket launched into space last year, officials told local media. The metal ring – reportedly two to three metres (6.5-10 feet) in diameter and weighing over 40 kilograms (90 pounds)

Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk has built a 9.2 percent stake in Twitter, a regulatory filing showed on Monday, sending the micro-blogging site’s shares soaring 16 percent in premarket trading. Late March, the silicon valley billionaire said he was giving “serious thought” to building a new social media platform. Musk was responding to a Twitter user’s

A study of different sounds captured by NASA’s Perseverance rover on Mars has revealed that sound waves behave differently on the Red Planet. The study found that sound travels much more slowly on Mars than it travels on Earth. It also behaved in some unexpected ways that could have consequences in setting up communications platforms

NASA on Friday began a critical two-day-long test of its giant Space Launch System (SLS) rocket complete with a simulated countdown, as the agency gears up to return humans to the Moon. Known as the “wet dress rehearsal,” it is the final major test before the Artemis I mission this summer: an uncrewed lunar flight

There has been a considerable amount of support for Ukraine in the US amidst its war with Russia, from countries and companies alike. The latest firm to show solidarity with the European nation is billionaire entrepreneur Jeff Bezos’ commercial space tourism company Blue Origin. Its latest space flight on Thursday featured the Ukrainian national flag.

Astronomers have discovered the farthest and oldest star ever seen, a dot of light that shined 12.9 billion years ago, or barely 900 million years after the Big Bang that gave birth to the universe. The light from the star must have travelled 12.9 billion light-years to reach the Earth. The newly discovered star appeared

A batch of dome-shaped ice volcanoes that look unlike anything else known in our solar system and may still be active have been identified on Pluto using data from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, showing that this remote frigid world is more dynamic than previously known. Scientists said on Tuesday that these cryovolcanoes — numbering perhaps

American pop artist Jeff Koons is to send sculptures to the Moon later this year on a spacecraft blasting off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, his gallery said Tuesday. Koons, one of the most celebrated and expensive living artists, is famed for kitsch pieces such as “Ballon Dog” and “Rabbit,” and his work

A US astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts left the International Space Station (ISS) together on a Soyuz capsule as they headed back to Earth on Wednesday, despite heightened US-Russian antagonism over the war in Ukraine. The Russian Soyuz capsule carrying NASA’s Mark Vande Hei and his cosmonaut peers Anton Shkaplerov and Pyotr Dubrov successfully undocked from

From Earth, those taking photographers of space often capture magnificent images of distant galaxies, planets, and moons. Last week, however, astrophotographer Sebastian Voltmer captured something completely different. On March 23, NASA astronaut Raja Chari and Matthias Maurer of the European Space Agency (ESA) spent nearly seven hours outside the International Space Station (ISS), completing various

The death throes of a red giant star have been seen in unprecedented clarity by astronomers, exhibiting an unusual trait. V Hydrae (or V Hya for short) was a star that ejected six different rings of material. The exact mechanism in which these intriguing “smoke rings” develop is still unknown. V Hya is an asymptotic

The hunt to find signs of ancient life on Mars involves bringing back rock samples from the Red Planet — these are currently being collected by NASA’s Perseverance rover on the 45-km-wide Jezero Crater. The initial plan was to send a sample-return lander (SRL) by 2026 and get back the samples by 2031. But that timeline appears

The European Space Agency’s solar orbiter has taken the highest-resolution image yet of the Sun’s full disk and atmosphere, the corona, during its latest close flyby of our home star. The orbiter was at a distance of just 75 million kilometres – half the distance between Earth’s average orbit and the Sun – on March

Israel’s Brain. Space, a four-year-old startup that studies data on brain activity, is set to put its gear to test on astronauts in space next week during a SpaceX shuttle flight to the International Space Station (ISS). Three astronauts on the planned private space-flight firm Axiom Space’s mission to the ISS will use a special

SpaceX has ended production of new Crew Dragon astronaut capsules, a company executive told Reuters, as Elon Musk’s space transportation company heaps resources on its next-generation spaceship program. Capping the fleet at four Crew Dragons adds more urgency to the development of the astronaut capsule’s eventual successor, Starship, SpaceX’s moon and Mars rocket. Starship’s debut

NASA will run a live broadcast of the return to Earth of American astronaut Mark Vande Hei after a record-breaking 355-day mission aboard the International Space Station (ISS). Along with Vande Hei, two Russian cosmonauts — Anton Shkaplerov and Pyotr Dubrov — will also touch down in Kazakhstan aboard a Soyuz MS-19 capsule on March

Researchers have detected a mysterious set of waves coming out of the Sun that, inexplicably, appears to travel three times faster than earlier predicted. The researchers think these waves could help them understand the interiors of the Sun, which is usually not observed even by space-based telescopes. Described as a “true mystery”, these waves were

NASA plans to use multiple private spacecraft to land astronauts on the Moon under its ambitious Artemis project. Initially, it had picked only the Elon Musk-owned SpaceX but it seems the US space agency has been rethinking its strategy. The agency, this week, announced that it wanted to support the development of a second privately

A new study has suggested that ‘space lettuce’ can help astronauts maintain strong bone health during long trips. The study, carried out by researchers from the University of California, Davis, saw the creation of an experimental strain of lettuce that they say can help those staying in space for long durations to maintain good bone health.

NASA said a gigantic asteroid is set to make a close approach to Earth this week. Scientists have determined the size of the space rock — called 2013 BO76 — to be around 200-450 metres wide, and it will be travelling at a staggering speed of 50,000kmph. Although NASA has classified the asteroid as “potentially

NASA’s Juno mission made its 39th close flyby of Jupiter recently and captured an incredible image of the planet’s southern hemisphere. However, a closer look at the image also revealed two more heavenly bodies nearby — Jupiter’s moons Io and Europa. Juno made the close fly in mid-January this year but NASA released the image

Weeks after Moscow forced the 11th-hour cancellation of a rocket launch for British satellite venture OneWeb from Russia’s Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, the company said on Monday it has contracted with Elon Musk’s SpaceX to send its satellites into orbit. Terms of the deal with California-based SpaceX, a direct competitor of OneWeb in the burgeoning broadband

In a major milestone for astronomy, NASA has confirmed the existence of a massive 5,000 planets beyond our own solar system. Not so long ago, we only knew a handful of planets that revolved around our Sun, but the quest to know the world beyond always continued. NASA has now added a fresh batch of

Blue Origin engineer Gary Lai will replace “Saturday Night Live” comic Pete Davidson in the space tourism company’s latest flight, it said on Monday. Davidson had pulled out after the flight, originally meant to launch this week, was postponed to March 29 to run some more pre-flight tests on one of the vehicle’s subsystems. The

NASA has shared a stunning image of a “cosmic flower in bloom” on Instagram. The photograph showed a heavenly entity resembling a flower in the Ring Nebula, which is located about 2,000 light-years away from us, in the constellation Lyra. The image, which showed a halo around the planetary nebula appearing like floral petals, was

Scientists have detected a mysterious radio signal emanating from our galaxy, Milky Way, that has left them baffled. They say the signal is so rare that only one other of its kind has ever been identified. They feel the signal could be coming out of a white dwarf pulsar. A pulsar is a rotating neutron

NASA has shared an image of what astronomers say is the first observation of a giant debris cloud formed by a massive collision of celestial bodies. Astronomers observed the cloud as it passed in front of its star and briefly blocked its light. Astronomers have long found evidence of collision among celestial bodies. But those

SpaceX successfully launched its Falcon 9 rocket for a record-breaking 12th time on Saturday (March 19), and then returned to Earth for yet another successful touchdown. The Falcon 9 was launched into low-Earth orbit from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 12:24am ET on March 19 (9:54am IST), carrying 53 of SpaceX’s Starlink Internet

Russia will start work on its own Mars mission given that the European Space Agency (ESA) has suspended a joint project in the wake of the Ukraine invasion, Interfax news agency quoted a top official as saying on Friday. The ESA announced on Thursday that it would be impossible to continue cooperating with Russia on

Three Russian cosmonauts blasted off to the International Space Station Friday, as Moscow’s military intervention in Ukraine brought the Kremlin’s relations with the West to their lowest point since the Soviet era. Russian space veteran Oleg Artemyev and rookies Denis Matveyev and Sergei Korsakov set off at 3:55pm GMT (9:25pm IST), a NASA live feed

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space tourism service has postponed until March 29 a flight initially set for next week, while Saturday Night Live comic Pete Davidson will not be a passenger on the launch, the company said on Thursday. The company, in a brief notice first posted on Twitter, gave no immediate explanation for the

NASA’s massive new rocket began its first journey to a launchpad on Thursday ahead of a battery of tests that will clear it to blast off to the Moon this summer. It left the Kennedy Space Center’s Vehicle Assembly Building around 5:47pm ET (21:47 GMT) and began an 11-hour journey on a crawler-transporter to the

Eugene Parker, a pioneering American astrophysicist whose mathematical prediction that charged particles streamed from stars in a solar wind was met with disbelief before he was ultimately vindicated, has died aged 94, NASA said on Wednesday. Parker was hailed as a visionary who laid the groundwork for the field of heliophysics, the science of understanding the