A cosmic gift of great price

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

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

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

I’m responding to an article by Pete Lawrence in the April 2025 issue, titled ‘Flora crosses the Leo Triplet’ (Big Three, in the Sky Guide), which spurred me to have a look for this minor planet. I al

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

The high-tech Japanese sake company Asahi Shuzo is taking a bold step forward by attempting to brew its sake off-world for the first time, with the ultimate goal of being able to brew sake on the Moon