The strange cloud-like protursion above Mars' limb (around the 1 o'clock point). Credit: Wayne Jaeschke. Last week, amateur astronomer Wayne Jaeschke noticed something peculiar in his observations of Mars — there appeared to be a cloud-like structure hanging above the limb of the planet....

The Aurora from Terje Sorgjerd on Vimeo. I actually posted this jaw-dropping video on Discovery News last month, but today it got picked up on Digg, so I was reminded why I had to feature it. The video is actually composed of 22,000 high-definition photographs, stitched together is a finely crafted...

Exoplanets may reveal their location through radio emissions (NASA) In 2009, I wrote about a fascinating idea: in the hunt for “Earth-like” exoplanets, perhaps we could detect the radio emissions from a distant world possessing a magnetosphere. This basically builds on the premise that planets...

"Dad?" A scene from War of the Worlds. This rather outlandish, sci-fi notion comes straight from the fertile minds of researchers from MIT, the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard University who are proposing a biology experiment that could be sent on a future Mars surface mission....

Comet Tempel 1 near Stardust-NExT close approach (NASA) A NASA spacecraft, a lonely comet and a Valentine’s date with no comparison. Last night, NASA’s veteran Stardust-NExT mission successfully visited its second comet, Tempel 1. Having already been visited by NASA’s Deep Impact mission...

Solar spicules as imaged by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (NASA) There’s one recurring question I’ve been asking for nearly a decade: Why is the Sun’s corona (its atmosphere) so hot? When asking this out loud I inevitably get the sarcastic “um, because the Sun is…...

Are those Martian fossils in meteorite ALH84001? (NASA) “Panspermia” is a hypothesis that life is transferred from planet-to-planet and star system-to-star system through some interplanetary or interstellar means. But for panspermia to work, this life needs to be sufficiently protected...

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...

There’s not a lot to add to this video, it’s too awesome. It was captured by NASA’s converted DC-8 jet that was flying over Australia when the Japanese Hayabusa spacecraft broke up during re-entry. I’ll let the video do the rest of the talking: Oh yes, and that little dot ahead...

Hayabusa re-enters over the Australian Outback, generating a bright fireball (screen grabs from the JAXA video feed) Staring hard at the live streaming video of the black Australian skies, I was hoping to see a faint streak of light glide across the camera’s field of view. But no, it wasn’t...