Elon Musk has shared a video that helps visualize the sheer scale of SpaceX’s rockets, and the results are awe-inspiring. The CEO retweeted a video on Wednesday from YouTube channel Corridor Crew, which uses visual effects to show the size of the Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, and BFR rockets in real-life situations.

Scientists still believe it possible that extraterrestrial life could flourish in our own neighbourhood. This week, Nasa’s veteran Curiosity rover discovered complex organic matter that had been buried and preserved for more than 3bn years in sediments forming a lake bed. This means that if microbial life did land on Mars, it would be nourished.

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Researchers surveyed stars, finding that the Milky Way is twice as large as previously thought.

A team of French researchers who calculated the minimal number of people that would be needed in order to ensure that a healthy multi-generational crew could make the journey to Proxima b.

A team of Japanese scientists led by Masahiro Kayama of Tohoku University's Frontier Research Institute for Interdisciplinary Sciences, has discovered a mineral known as moganite in a lunar meteorite found in a hot desert in northwest Africa. This is significant because moganite is a mineral that requires water to form, reinforcing the belief that water exists on the Moon.

Fifty years ago, 5 unmanned lunar orbiters circled the moon, taking extremely high resolution photos of the surface. They were trying to find the perfect landing site for the Apollo missions. They would be good enough to blow up to 40 x 54ft images that the astronauts would walk across looking for the great spot. After their use, the images were locked away from the public, as at the time they would have revealed the superior technology of the USA’s spy satellite cameras, which the orbiters cameras were designed from. Instead the images from that time were grainy and low resolution, made to be so by NASA.

As the moon pulls away from the Earth, our planet’s rotation is slowing, making our days 1/75,000 second longer each year.

The Chang'e-4 space probe would be the first ever to make the trip.

NASA's Juno spacecraft finds lightning on Jupiter is same as in Earth in some ways, opposite in others.

Chris Hadfield, most widely known for his zero-gravity guitar-playing, has seen an impressive amount of space travel. Between his first spaceflight in 1995, his second in 2001, and a third in 2013, Hadfield has flown inside NASA space shuttles, a Russian Soyuz spacecraft, and the International Space Station. Hadfield, who's now retired, shares his expertise about rockets, spaceships, spacewalking, and Mars exploration in a new web course on the online platform MasterClass.

Rakesh Mogul, a Cal Poly Pomona professor of biological chemistry, was the lead author of an article in the journal Astrobiology that offers the first biochemical evidence explaining the reason the contamination persists.

Gravity of distant Moon-sized objects could do the job attributed to a hypothetical Planet Nine.

The search for habitable exoplanets spans far and wide, pushing the limits of what our modern telescopes are capable of. But rest assured that we aren’t ignoring what’s in our own backyard. Researchers have kept diligent eyes on Alpha Centauri, the closest system to Earth that happens to house Sun-like stars.

Science operations for NASA's Opportunity rover have been temporarily suspended as it waits out a growing dust storm on Mars. NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter first detected the storm on Friday, June 1. As soon as the orbiter team saw how close the storm was to Opportunity, they notified the rover's team to begin preparing contingency plans.

You can now sign up for a 10-day mission aboard the International Space Station (ISS) — if you've got $55 million to spare. That's the price just announced by Axiom Space, a Houston-based company that's organizing expeditions to the ISS and working to build the first commercial space station. The $55 million covers the orbital stay, transportation to and from the ISS, and a 15-week astronaut-training program.

The planet’s orbit alternates from elliptical to almost perfectly circular — and has for hundreds of millions of years.

Pluto has an extensive dune system, but the grains that make up the wind-blown mounds are certainly not sand, a new study reports.

A 'self-eating' rocket engine which could place small satellites in orbit more easily and more affordably is under development at universities in Scotland and Ukraine.

Modelling suggests a shift in thinking makes massive megastructure much more manageable. Andrew Masterson reports. 

A European mission will test whether nets and harpoons can capture and remove space junk

The Universe is so unimaginably big, and it's positively teeming with an almost infinite supply of potentially life-giving worlds. So where the heck is everybody?

Inside a neutron star—the city-size, hyperdense cinder left after a supernova—modern physics plunges off the edge of the map. There, gravity squeezes matter to densities several times greater than those found in the nucleus of an atom, creating what theorists suspect could be a breeding ground for never-before-seen exotic particles and interactions. But densities this high cannot be probed by laboratory experiments, and remain too challenging for even today’s most powerful computers to tackle.

An asteroid that cohabits an orbit with Jupiter came from outside the solar system.

New study suggests our star will become 'one of the prettiest objects in the night sky.'

Astronomers using cutting-edge skywatching devices have identified an extremely fast-growing black hole, cataloging it as a ‘monster’ that eats the mass equivalent of our sun every two days.

A big challenge humanity faces in venturing off Earth and into deep space is how to tackle the dangers of cosmic radiation.​ A team has now discovered a drug treatment that could not only prevent cognitive deficits caused by this radiation, but actually repair damage in the brain after exposure.

When you spend almost more than $1 billion on a beautiful spacecraft, it can be a very nervous wait to see if everything actually pays off. But if and when it does, the results can be rather glorious. And NASA’s Juno spacecraft has just paid off in a huge way. One of the major goals of the Juno mission, which began in July 2016 when the probe entered orbit around Jupiter, has been to study the interior of this fascinating gas giant. We can see its amazing cloud tops, sure, but we really didn’t know what’s going on inside.

The idea of a colony of humans on Mars isn’t just science fiction anymore; NASA and space agencies around the world, along with independent scientists and researchers, are working hard to determine just what it would take for humanity to take root on the Red Planet. Getting there will be an immense challenge, as will setting up structures, creating sustainable sources of food, and battling the inhospitable elements, but sex might be the biggest risk of all.

Most of us have looked up at the night sky and wondered how far away the stars are or in what direction they are moving. The truth is, scientists don’t know the exact positions or velocities of the vast majority of the stars in the Milky Way. But now a new tranche of data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite, aiming to map stars in our galaxy in unprecedented detail, has come in to shed light on the issue.

Prof Stephen Hawking's final research paper suggests that our Universe may be one of many similar to our own. The theory resolves a cosmic paradox of the late physicist's own making. It also points a way forward for astronomers to find evidence of the existence of parallel universes.

NASA is set to launch its next Mars lander, InSight, early Saturday morning. But something’s different about this launch. It’s taking place on the West Coast, at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

Ken Shen was racing against the sun. It was 3 A.M. on April 25 and Shen—an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley—was sitting at his kitchen table in his pajamas. At that precise moment the scientists behind the European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecraft released the mission’s second batch of data. And Shen was on a mission to comb that data to find the Milky Way’s fastest-moving stars, then to verify their identities via independent observations on ground-based telescopes.

It may have been one giant leap for man, but those steps may have consequences for mankind. The presence of astronauts on the moon caused an unexpected warming of its subsurface temperatures for a period of time in the 1970s, a new study has found after delving into "lost" tapes from the Apollo missions. In 1971 and 1972, NASA deployed sensors on the moon during the Apollo 15 and 17 missions in an effort to measure the moon's surface and subsurface temperatures — a project dubbed the heat flow experiment.