Meteor hunters unite!

You’re woken in the middle of the night by an urgent phone call. An asteroid is headed straight for Earth and it’s your job to find out if it’ll strike the planet and rain destruction down upon us all

Whichever way you look at it, this year’s Perseid meteor shower peak on 12 August is going to be challenging for naked-eye observers. As with all meteor showers, some years are better than others, but

1 Our Moonwatch target (see page 52), the walled plain Flammarion, is well placed this evening and tomorrow evening. You can also catch it on the waning Moon on the morning of 16 August. 2 This evenin

New model suggests Hawking radiation is speeding cosmic decay Scientists have long predicted that the Universe’s lifetime is effectively forever – specifically, 101100 years. But now scientists from R

Scientists from the University of Hawaii’s Institute for Astronomy (IfA) have discovered the most energetic cosmic explosions since the Big Bang. Extreme nuclear transients (ENTs) occur when massive s

Thirty years ago, on the evening of 23 July 1995, amateur astronomers Alan Hale and Thomas Bopp were both independently looking at the same globular star cluster. Experienced observers who knew the sk