Anders. Borman. Lovell. The names of the first three humans to journey around the moon will echo throughout eternity. But these brave Apollo 8 astronauts were actually not the first earthlings to complete the voyage. Two tortoises beat NASA to the moon by a matter of months. Fifty years ago today, on September 18, 1968, the Soviet Union’s Zond 5 spacecraft circled the moon, ferrying the first living creatures known to have orbited another world. On board were two Russian steppe tortoises along with some worms, flies and seeds.

Astrophysicists just found a planet orbiting the star HD 26965, 16 light years away from Earth. Finding exoplanets is always fun, and the fact that this one is in the star’s habitable zone (where liquid water could exist on its surface) is a bonus. But that’s not why people are particularly psyched about the announcement. See, HD 26965 also goes by 40 Eridani A—the star orbited by Spock's homeworld in Star Trek. That means they found Vulcan. Ok, fine, they found a real-world analog to a completely fictional world, but you can't blame Star Trek fans for being excited.

A Japanese asteroid-sampling probe is about to get up close and personal with its target space rock. The Hayabusa2 spacecraft will drop two tiny rovers onto the asteroid Ryugu this week, possibly as early as Thursday (Sept. 20), if all goes according to plan. The Hayabusa2 team began prepping seriously for the epic maneuver last week. The current schedule calls for the mother ship to descend toward Ryugu today (Sept. 19) and for the two little disk-shaped robots...

Newfound exoplanet orbits a star identified with the famed science officer from "Star Trek."

What's happened to our Sun? Nothing very unusual -- it just threw a filament. Toward the middle of 2012, a long standing solar filament suddenly erupted into space producing an energetic Coronal Mass Ejection (CME). The filament had been held up for days by the Sun's ever changing magnetic field and the timing of the eruption was unexpected. Watched closely by the Sun-orbiting Solar Dynamics Observatory, the resulting explosion shot electrons and ions into the Solar System, some of which arrived at Earth three days later and impacted Earth's magnetosphere.

A trio of researchers affiliated with several institutions in the U.S. and Canada has found evidence that suggests nuclear material beneath the surface of neutron stars may be the strongest material in the universe. In their paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters, M. E. Caplan, A. S. Schneider, and C. J. Horowitz describe their neutron star simulation and what it showed.

Astronomers with the Breakthrough Listen program used AI (artificial intelligence) to find 72 repeating, short, unpredictable radio bursts, from a mysterious source 3 billion light years away.

Just a cosmic hop, skip and jump away, an Earth-size planet orbits the closest star to our sun, Proxima Centauri. Ever since the discovery of the exoplanet—known as Proxima Centauri b—in 2016, people have wondered whether it could be capable of sustaining life. Now, using computer models similar to those used to study climate change on Earth, researchers have found that, under a wide range of conditions...

A space observatory at the centre of swirling alien conspiracy theories has asked for “patience” as it continues to be locked down. The Sunspot Solar Observatory in Sunspot, New Mexico caught the attention of the world when it was shut down by FBI agents who reportedly swooped on the facility after arriving in elite Blackhawk helicopters. It led immediately to suggestions the advanced technology inside of the facility spotted something it shouldn’t – such as proof of extraterrestrials, UFOs or even some baseless speculation that the observatory had spotted that the sun has started dying.

NASA has released the first image from its new space telescope. TESS, short for Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, is helping scientists detect and study new planets in other solar systems. The telescope launched in April on a SpaceX rocket, and on July 25, TESS slipped into a unique orbit between Earth and the moon. The telescope is now scanning the night sky, staring down distant solar systems, and hunting for small, rocky, Earth-like planets.

The universe is filled with billions of massive celestial objects, from stars to planets to comets to asteroids. But what happens when lines start to blur between these classifications, and we just can’t place an object in any major category? Well, brown dwarfs know this better than anyone. They’re far too massive to be planets, but not massive enough for hydrogen atoms to fuse in their cores and become stars.

The puzzling story of a mysterious malfunction 250 miles above Earth

SpaceX has signed its first customer to fly on the company’s huge new rocket, the BFR, the company says. The passenger will fly on the monster ship around the Moon, though there are no details yet regarding when the trip will happen. SpaceX says it will announce who is flying — and why — on Monday, September 17th. The BFR, or the Big Falcon Rocket, is the giant rocket that SpaceX is currently developing to send humans to the Moon and Mars. The BFR design, presentated by CEO Elon Musk last year, consists of a combined rocket and spaceship, called the BFS for Big Falcon Spaceship.

SpaceX on Thursday announced a new plan to launch a tourist around the Moon using its Big Falcon Rocket (BFR), a massive launch vehicle that is being designed to carry people into deep space.

Searching the skies for extraterrestrial life means spending a lot of time separating signals from noise. Luckily, AI is particularly good at that. In a new study accepted by The Astrophysical Journal, researchers describe how they used data previously collected from fast radio bursts (FRBs), a type of mysterious pulse from billions of light years away, to train a neural network to find dozens more in already-collected data.

Another success for the Chinese private startup OneSpace, but no rockets have gone to orbit yet

New research suggests rocks from outer space could provide a proxy for studying the neutrinos generated in the explosion that occurs when a massive star dies. Let us sympathize, for a moment, with neutrino researchers. These tireless folks devote their energies toward understanding subatomic particles that, it would appear, want nothing to do with them.

Do you have a million-dollar idea to help astronauts turn gas into sugar in space?

At the 2018 International Space Development (ISDC) meeting in May, Jeff Bezos—founder of Amazon and Blue Origin—laid out his vision for human expansion into the solar system. Bezos attended the event to accept the Gerard K. O’Neill Memorial Award for Space Settlement Promotion, named for the visionary physicist who pioneered many human space exploration concepts. While there, Bezos expressed a comprehensive perspective on the future of spaceflight, including the idea that we need to “leave Earth to save it.”

The Kepler roller-coaster ride continues. NASA's low-on-fuel Kepler space telescope, which has discovered more than 2,650 alien planets to date, has awoken from yet another slumber and begun making science observations again, agency officials announced today (Sept. 5). The $600 million Kepler mission launched in March 2009, tasked with determining how common Earth-like planets are around the galaxy. The spacecraft initially studied more than 150,000 stars simultaneously, looking for tiny brightness dips caused by the passage of orbiting planets across these stars' faces. [Gallery: A World of Kepler Planets]

First came the trees. In the town of Salamanca, Spain, the photographer noticed how distinctive a grove of oak trees looked after being pruned. Next came the galaxy.

Pluto wrongly lost its planet status, say, scientists, suggesting that the icy dwarf should be reclassified as a planetary body. In 2006, the International Astronomical Union (IAU), a global group of astronomy experts, established a definition of a planet that required it to "clear" its orbit, or in other words, be the largest gravitational force in its orbit.

Phosphorus, which is vital to life but somewhat rare, condensed inside asteroids in the outer Solar System before moving back towards the sun, where some of it ended up on Earth, according to new research.

At more than 60 years into the Space Age, fictional spaceships appear on our screens at a far greater frequency than the real things launch in real life. But that doesn't mean they'll actually fly. When it comes to imagining interstellar travel, the history of spaceflight up until now hasn't given science-fiction designers a whole lot to work with. All we've seen are basic rockets (useful for escaping Earth's gravity well), plane-like space shuttles (useful for re-entering it), Moon modules (the lunar lander), and modular orbital tubes (the International Space Station).

In the darkest and coldest parts of its polar regions, a team of scientists has directly observed definitive evidence of water ice on the Moon's surface. These ice deposits are patchily distributed and could possibly be ancient. At the southern pole, most of the ice is concentrated at lunar craters, while the northern pole's ice is more widely, but sparsely spread.

Two years after launching from Florida, a NASA spacecraft is closing in on an ancient asteroid, Bennu, for a sample of space dust that could reveal clues to the start of life in the solar system. The spacecraft, OSIRIS-REx, has even snapped its first, blurry pic of the cosmic body, which is about the size of a small mountain, about 500 yards (meters) in diameter.

A British nuclear start-up company is developing a nuclear fusion rocket engine as a step towards revolutionising space travel. The UK company Applied Fusion Systems are currently filing a patent for a new nuclear fusion rocket engine, creating by turning a small fusion reactor into a rocket. This technology could be used to run from a compact nuclear fusion reactor, a development which could pave the way for high speed, interstellar space travel.

NASA’s Cassini mission and Hubble Space Telescope provided information that suggest a form of chemical energy, that life can feed on, appears to exist on Saturn's moon Enceladus.

According to two recently deleted job postings on the internet, where nothing can ever really be deleted, Amazon Web Services is hiring technical engineers to develop cloud services for satellites and “space-based systems.” TJI Research spotted the listings, which called for a software engineer and product manager to “to help innovate and disrupt the launch, satellite and space world with new AWS products, services and features,” according to one of the job ads, for “a new AWS service that will have a historic impact.”

US space agency Nasa has delayed its a mission to send a satellite closer to the Sun than any before. The Parker Solar Probe was set to launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida on Saturday, but last-minute investigations have delayed it for 24 hours. It is now scheduled to blast off - on board the mammoth Delta-IV Heavy rocket - on Sunday morning.

NASA solves a Mars mystery after analyzing a strange flake-like object.

Astronomers have just assembled one of the most comprehensive portraits yet of the universe’s evolutionary history.

South Africa is becoming one of the world’s most important radio astronomy hubs, thanks in large part to its role as co-host of the Square Kilometer Array (SKA). Now a new telescope is being unveiled that will be built at the SKA South Africa site in the Karoo.

A project called Breakthrough Starshot could reveal the secrets of our nearest star neighbors.

A giant ring of black holes has been discovered 300 million light-years away, offering new clues about what happens when galaxies collide. Using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, astronomers detected a very bright source of X-rays that is likely fueled by either a ring of stellar-mass black holes or neutron stars — the small, dense corpses left after stellar explosions, — according to a new study.