Q&a with an aurora scientist

It’s difficult to fully grasp the enormity and extremity of Jupiter. The planet – a striped behemoth of swirling gas with around 100 moons, one of which is larger than Mercury – dominates the Solar Sy

Amazing answers to your curious questions

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

We were at latitude 71º north, in the Barents Sea off Norway, when we got our first “Wow!” moment. No geomagnetic storm had been predicted, but there, around the stars of Cassiopeia, a greenish curtai

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

One of the Cassini orbiter’s stand-out discoveries in the Saturn system was plumes of water-ice erupting from fissures in the moon Enceladus. These ice particles make up the diffuse E ring surrounding