Chelyabinsk 10 years on

Of the hundreds of thousands of asteroids in our solar system, it is all too feasible that one could strike Earth. If scientists discover this is likely to happen, what are our options for defending ourselves – and who will make the key decisions? Tomas Weber reports

We all love watching meteor showers like the Perseids in August. These dramatic events are one of the easiest astronomical events to observe because they’re regular, you don’t need to travel to see th

Isn’t it amazing that astronomy – humanity’s oldest science – continues to generate such a delightful amount of new knowledge? Seeing as we’ve been studying the motion of the stars for a good long whi

Meteor showers occur when Earth passes through the fine dust debris strewn around the orbit of a comet. This happens when Earth is in a similar position in its orbit every year, and meteor showers rep

20 amazing answers t o curious

‘The universe is a pretty big place. If it’s just us, it seems like an awful waste of space,’ wrote the American astronomer and author Carl Sagan in his book, Contact. Ever since humans first huddled