Beyond pluto

Ten years ago, Pluto emerged from the gloom at the Solar System’s ragged edge – and a new world came in from the cold. Five billion kilometres (3 billion miles) from Earth, on 14 July 2015, NASA’s pia

Two contrasting visions of humanity’s future in space

The Universe is a big and complex beast, and doesn’t always behave in the way we might expect. So it’s not surprising that there are many misconceptions and misunderstandings about space. Some common

Where did life on Earth begin? That sounds like a relatively straightforward question. Surely life on Earth began… well, on Earth, right? We know this planet had the right conditions for life to arise

In early April, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope completed its third observing programme, a nine-month-long roster of research proposed by astronomers around the world. Among the many groundbreaking

On 27 December 2024, the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) telescope in Rio Hurtado in Chile discovered asteroid 2024 YR4 speeding past Earth. The detection could have been too lat