Space News & Blog Articles

Step outside on a clear night almost anywhere in Britain and look up. For roughly a third of the global population, the Milky Way is simply gone, permanently bleached out by the orange glow of our own making. But light pollution is no longer just an astronomer's complaint, it has become a public health crisis, an ecological emergency, and a regulatory blind spot all at once.

Turn on a tap and watch the water hit the sink basin. Right where it lands, the water is fast and thin. Then, just a centimetre or two out, it suddenly slows and thickens. That abrupt transition is called a hydraulic jump. It happens in an instant, it's entirely unremarkable, and it's the same process driving the largest atmospheric wave ever found in the Solar System and that wave is on Venus.

When scientists at the Green Bank Observatory shared a fuzzy image of a few scattered pixels with their colleagues, the reaction wasn't exactly awe. Then one of them said it quietly: "There are four people in those pixels."

You’re an anaerobic microbe sunbathing on a Martian beach billions of years ago listening to the small waves hit the shoreline as you take in the perchlorates in the Martian regolith. This is because while Mars is warm and wet, it still lacks sufficient oxygen, so anaerobic life like yourself doesn’t need oxygen to survive. You’re chilling for several hours and eventually notice the water hasn’t touched you. You remember over-hearing some otherworldly fellows who briefly landed and discussed the landscape didn’t look well formed, so they left.

As Earth's climate warms, glaciers are retreating. This is evident all around the world. Glacial retreat isn't always a peaceful process and can significantly effect the landscape. Our fleet of Earth-observing satellites bears witness to these changes.

NASA's Juno mission to Jupiter reveals a planet with an interior structure that is much more complex than ever previously thought. At least that’s the latest word from several of Juno’s scientific team members who were on hand at a press conference at the European Geosciences Union’s 2026 General Assembly last week in Vienna.

Trying to solve quantum gravity is frustrating. We have made tremendous progress in quantum theory, but it seems that every time we find a new quantum technique, there's a reason it doesn't quite work with gravity. Take, for example, the case of quantum fluctuations and renormalization.

If you’ve ever taken an introductory astronomy class, you’ve probably seen the Hertzsprung-Russell (HR) diagram. This graph maps out the life cycle of stars by plotting their temperature against their luminosity, and has been a “cheat sheet” for stellar astrophysics for over a century. But the universe is full of more than just stars, and a new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv from Gabriel Steward and Matthew Hedman of the University of Idaho, attempts to do for the density and mass of all objects what the HR diagram did for the lifecycle of stars - provide a coherent, visual map to represent them.

What made Earth the planet that life chose? It's a question scientists have wrestled with for decades, and the answers are rarely simple. Distance from the Sun matters, liquid water matters and a magnetic field that deflects lethal radiation matters. But a new study published in the journal Terra Nova adds something unexpected to that list…. the slow, geological rise of the continents themselves, and a semi precious gemstone most people know from jewellery shops.