Solar Dynamics Observatory view of the solar disk shortly after eruption (NASA). This morning, at 08:55 UT, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) detected a C3-class flare erupt inside a sunspot cluster. 100,000 kilometers away, deep within the solar atmosphere (the corona), an extended magnetic...

For this special little planet, today has been a very big day. Although we’ve speculated that planets the size of Earth must exist elsewhere in the cosmos, it wasn’t until one of the co-investigators working with the Kepler Space Telescope said he had statistical evidence that worlds of...

Quite frankly, I’m stunned. An Australian amateur astronomer has just observed his second ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ event: an impact in the atmosphere of Jupiter. Phil Plait was very quick to get the news out, describing it as a “major coincidence,” and he ain’t wrong! Anthony...

Something rather bizarre was observed in the asteroid belt on January 6. Ray Villard at Discovery News has just posted an exciting article about the discovery of a comet… but it’s not your average, run-of-the-mill kinda comet. This comet appears to orbit the Sun, embedded in the asteroid...

The strange objects orbiting the two stars could be mangled white dwarfs... but the jury is still out (NASA) The first results from NASA’s Kepler exoplanet hunter are in and a perplexing early result has been announced. Yes, the space telescope is working fine, and no, it hasn’t spotted an...

Despite the fact the UK is effectively frozen out of participating in any kind of human spaceflight activity (we can blame Maggie Thatcher for that particular stroke of genius when she masterminded the 1986 Outer Space Act), it would appear Will Whitehorn, president of Virgin Galactic, has been meeting...

A better chance of making it to Saturn: The Reliant Robin Space Shuttle from the BBCs Top Gear. An ad on Craigslist has just appeared: Astronaut Needed (Northern Alberta). Sign me up! Oh, hold on… “Astronaut needed for experimental flight to Titan. I have been working on this project now...

Triton, Neptune’s largest moon, hasn’t been studied in detail since Voyager 2 did a flyby in 1989. That was until a team headed by Will Grundy, a Lowell Observatory planetary scientist, did a 10-year study into the distribution of the moon’s ices. Soon to be published in the journal...

It can mean only one thing: John Cusack is revisiting his Con Air days. Tonight, our screens are being hijacked by Armageddon for two minutes between 10:45-11pm EDT, 9:45-10pm CDT, 8:45-9pm MDT and 10:45-11pm PDT. No, Jon & Kate aren’t going to be screaming at each other (why do people find...

The biggest factor hanging over human settlement of other worlds is the question of water. We need it to drink, we need it to cultivate food, we need it for fuel (indeed, we need it for the first lunar microbrewery); pretty much every human activity requires water. Supplies of water could be ferried...