A lava tube is just what it sounds like; a cave created when the surface of lava hardens but continues to flow underneath. When that trickles to a halt, the cave is left behind. These remaining caves…

The origin of carbon in the Milky Way is a mystery but one source of many elements is not: Dying white dwarfs. As those dying stars pass into oblivion, they sprinkle their ashes into the cosmos.…

When it comes to evolutionary biology and life on other planets, there is talk of amino acids, the building blocks of our existence. But for any of that to work we first needed magnetic fields and…

How a sunset would appear on other planets is a staple of science-fiction. The sun is as fundamental to grounding our existence as the earth, for most of us. Yet lots of people go months without…

Though we've only detected a few thousand exoplanets, there are likely 6,000,000,000 Earth-like ones out there, and that means millions could be "ocean worlds" capable of supporting life. Right now,…

Pluto, along with many other dwarf planets in the outer solar system, is often thought of as dark, icy and barren – with a surface temperature of just −230°C. But now a new study, published in…

How big is the universe? No one really knows, but since we are in just one Orion spur of the arm of Sagittarius in one galaxy, and there are an unknown number of galaxies, it's big. So big our galaxy…

A new paper uses a combination of cosmic voids – large expanding bubbles of space containing very few galaxies – and the faint imprint of sound waves in the very early Universe, known as baryon…

When a SpaceX crewed Dragon launches atop a Falcon 9 carrying the first astronauts launched from American soil by the United States, they will be making history, setting NASA on a trajectory for the…

The galaxy, named R5519, is 11 billion light-years from our Solar System and it is making stars at a rate 50 times greater than the Milky Way. The hole at its centre is truly massive, with a diameter…