How to see Bailey's Beads, the diamond ring, and maybe even the elusive shadow bands.

Millions of people will soon travel to a narrow strip in America to witness a rare event: a total solar eclipse. On 21 August, many will look up to the sky to witness this phenomenon – will you be one of them? In the following shortened excerpt from "Totality: The Great American Eclipses of 2017 and 2024," learn what types of eyewear you should be using to watch the Sun disappear, when you can do away with eye protection completely, and other ways to best view this event.

If you look up Uranus and Neptune in an encyclopedia, there's a good chance the pictures you see will be about 30 years old. In the late 1970s, the twin Voyager spacecraft launched on a grand tour of the solar system, taking advantage of a rare planetary alignment that only happens every 175 years. Voyager 2 flew past Uranus in January 1986, and Neptune in August 1989. The probe was traveling too fast, and lacked the fuel, to slow down and enter orbit.

The renowned physicist Stephen Hawking is working on a spacecraft that can travel at a fifth of the speed of light – meaning it could reach the nearest star and send back images of a suspected ‘Second Earth’ within 25 years – in a bid to save humanity. In a speech at the Starmus Festival, Professor Hawking warned humans must soon colonise another planet if we are to survive.

In 2015, a team of Scottish scientists announced they had found a way to slow the speed of light. By sending photons through a special mask, the researchers altered their shape.

“We must organize and train forces to be able to prevail in any future conflict which could extend into space.” On Friday, Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson officially created a new three-star general position in the Air Force for a Deputy Chief of Staff for Space Operations. The creation of this position was hinted at back in April and justified as a measure to better prepare the United States for space-based warfare.

A House Armed Services panel intends to create a new fighting force called Space Corps within the Air Force to improve the U.S. military’s ability to address threats in space, according to a summary of the Strategic Forces panel’s forthcoming fiscal 2018 mark.

Valentina Tereshkova was the first woman to go into space when she flew Vostok 6 in 1963. She spent almost three days in space and orbited Earth 48 times. That was her only trip into space. Tereshkova later toured the world to promote Soviet science and became involved in Soviet politics.

The Kepler space telescope's latest and most complete planet catalog adds 219 new candidates, including one that could be a close cousin to Earth.

China's Tiangong-2 space lab and Tianzhou-1 vehicle have completed a second refueling test, Chinese space officials said. This second robotic refueling trial wrapped up Thursday (June 15) after about two days "and cemented technical results from the first refueling," according to China’s state-run Xinhua news agency.

Our local gas giant has two more natural satellites added to its roster

It's official - NASA's Asteroid Redirect mission has entered its closing down phase, which means we can't expect to see a giant boulder orbiting our Moon any time soon. Bummer. Asteroid Redirect was started in 2015 with the goal to create the first-ever mission combining robot and human efforts. The plan was to send a robotic crew to a near-Earth asteroid, grab a huge rock from it, and redirect it in a stable orbit around the Moon.

NASA officials have announced some of the first targets to be observed by the much-anticipated James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) following its launch atop an Ariane 5 rocket, which is slated for lift-off in October 2018. The initial observations cover the gamut of the JWST's scientific targets, from studies aimed at unraveling the secrets of galaxy formation, to gaining a better understanding of our home solar system via an in-depth study of select planets, moons, and asteroids.

We’ve all heard about the mile high club, but now an expert has claimed that we need to start thinking about sex much further away from Earth too. On a recent Atlantic Live panel, Assistant Professor Kris Lehnhardt, from George Washington University, described sex in space as a “real concern” and one that humans have not addressed to date.

The United States will revive the long-dormant National Space Council, a group meant to coordinate space policy among government agencies and departments. Vice-president Mike Pence, who will chair the council, announced its reinstatement on 7 June at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.

Bread has been banned in space for 50 years thanks to the dangers of free-floating crumbs – but specially designed ovens mean astronauts could soon ditch tortillas.

NASA has found diverse minerals in rocks examined by the Curiosity rover on lower Mount Sharp, Mars. These suggest that wet environmental conditions there changed over time.

A team of researchers wants to ‘bake were nobody baked before’. Sometime in 2018, a microgravity oven is slated for launch to the International Space Station where it will bake the first space-grade bread in history. As anything on the International Space Station, this won’t be your regular bread. Designed and inspected from all scientific angles, the space bread will not only be filling and fresh, but also safe for the special environment.

Did our sun have a twin when it was born 4.5 billion years ago? Almost certainly yes—though not an identical twin. And so did every other sunlike star in the universe, according to a new analysis by a theoretical physicist from UC Berkeley and a radio astronomer from the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory at Harvard University.

In 1977, the sound of extraterrestrials was heard by human ears for the first time - or so people at the time thought. The Wow! Signal was detected by astronomer Jerry Ehman using Ohio State University's Big Ear radio telescope .

China is making preliminary preparations for a manned lunar landing mission, said Yang Liwei, deputy director general of China Manned Space Agency, in Beijing on Tuesday. It will not take long for the project to get official approval and funding, Yang said during a group interview at the Global Space Exploration Conference (GLEX 2017).

Chinese scientists will attempt to grow potatoes on the moon as part of a forthcoming lunar mission. According to a report in the Chongqing Morning Post, the potatoes will be sealed inside a "mini ecosystem" as part the Chang'e-4 mission due to launch next year. They'll be sharing a small cylinder on the surface of the Earth's only natural satellite with silkworm larvae as part of a series of experiments, Professor Xie Gengxin of Chongqing University told the paper.

While NASA was figuring out how to use rockets to reach the Moon, a super secret US government project was developing a gigantic reusable spaceship powered by atom bomb explosions that was designed to carry a crew of 20 to the outer Solar System by 1970. By David Szondy.

Excitement greets pictures of giant, chaotic weather systems plus new measurements that will help build unprecedented map of planet’s interior

This Wednesday, NASA will officially announce its intention to launch a probe that will dip inside the Sun's atmosphere, calling it the first ever mission to "touch the Sun". The Solar Probe Plus mission will have to cope with temperatures and radiation unlike any other probe, but the data it will collect in the process will help astronomers predict solar storms and provide clues on some of the deepest mysteries surrounding our closest star. In 1976, a 370-kilogram (815-pound) block of instruments called Helios 2 came within about 43 million kilometres (27 million miles) of the Sun's surface in its mission to study...

You'd think NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has seen everything there is to see on the Martian surface in the 11 years it's orbited our nearest neighbour, but a snapshot taken over the planet's South Pole has revealed something we can't...

Tabby's star, famous for its inexplicable dips in brightness, is going through one of those dips right now.

High concentrations of silica point to the existence of groundwater long after lakes evaporated. This finding extends the potential window for life on the...

SCIENTISTS believe they may have discovered evidence of a parallel universe that crashed into our own in a galactic impact mirroring a car crash. Since 2004, when it was first spotted by NASA, scientists have been baffled by the discovery an unusually cold region of space which is 1.8 billion light years across and colder than its surroundings. It was thought the region might have been a trick of light or it was colder because it had 10,000 less galaxies than other areas of the same size.

Please welcome to the stage a master illusionist. An energy beam that stabs out of galaxy M87 like a toothpick in a cocktail olive is pulling off the ultimate magic trick: seeming to move faster than the speed of light. Almost five times faster, in fact, as measured by the Hubble Space Telescope. This feat was first observed in 1995 in galaxy M87, and has been seen in many other galaxies since. It might have you questioning your entire reality. Nothing can break the cosmic speed limit, right? You can’t just flaunt the laws of physics… can you?

After a seven-month investigation, ESA has released the results of its inquiry into the crash of its unmanned Schiaparelli lander on Mars last October. Telemetry data and orbital images show that the accident was due to a violent rotation of the module that fooled the onboard computer.

Nearly 2,000 years ago, the first human-documented supernova was observed by ancient Chinese astronomers, who witnessed a bright "guest star" lighting up the night sky in 185 AD. A couple of millennia later, scientists have proposed various explanations for what gave rise to the supernova remnant RCW 86, but now a team of astrophysicists think they've pinned it down: the supernova was caused by one half of an exploding binary star system, which blasted its stellar partner with a flood of heavy elements, including calcium.

On March 24th, ESA astronaut Thomas Pesquet was joined by NASA astronaut Shane Kimbrough on a spacewalk outside the International Space Station… By Andrew Liszewski.