It's no surprise that water was crucial to the formation of life on Earth. What may surprise you is that water on earth is older than the sun itself. Identifying the original source of Earth's water…

Surprises in the dark. Credit: NASA GSFC, CC BY By Rene Breton, University of Southampton One of the many unanswered questions about the origin of life on Earth is: where did organic molecules –…

The nice thing about telescopes is that we can look back in time - light that is reaching us now may have originated a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, which means astronomers can view…

Astronomers have discovered clear skies and steamy water vapor on a planet known as HAT-P-11b - outside our solar system. HAT-P-11b is about the size of Neptune, making it the smallest exoplanet ever…

When Curiosity's successor and ExoMars land on Mars around 2021, we will see two different approaches to the search for life on Mars side by side. NASA's mission is the first stage of a two decade…

Planck telescope and the Cosmic microwave background. ESA and Planck, CC BY By Robert Crittenden, University of Portsmouth In March, scientists working on the BICEP2 experiment, a microwave telescope…

It seems that foreground galactic dust could be responsible for all of the signal observed by the BICEP2 team.  Two more shoes are waiting to drop.  Results of cross correlation and…

Miranda is a small, icy moon of Uranus and one of the most visually striking and enigmatic bodies in the solar system. Despite its relatively small size, Miranda appears to have experienced an…

An ultracompact dwarf galaxy known as M60-UCD1 harbors a supermassive black hole – the smallest galaxy known to contain such a massive light-sucking object. The astronomers used the Gemini North 8-…

The farside of the moon may have had some extremely explosive volcanic eruptions hundreds of millions of years ago. The findings, reported in a paper submitted to the Journal of Geophysical…