Killer magnetism

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

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

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

‘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

Mars is a pretty horrible place for any creature used to life on Earth. The average surface temperature is -63°C (-81°F) and doesn’t reach above freezing anywhere except right on the equator, during t

I found your recent article Are We Aliens? (June, p62) very interesting. I noticed it mentioned that samples from the Mars Sample Return mission would “give us further clues” about the panspermia theo