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.

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

To be housed in a building 22 stories high, on a plateau of the Atacama Desert of Chile, the Giant Magellan Telescope will be the largest optical telescope ever built.

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

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.

Observations made with ESO’s Very Large Telescope have for the first time revealed the effects predicted by Einstein’s general relativity on the motion of a star passing through the extreme gravitational field near the supermassive black hole in the centre of the Milky Way. This long-sought result represents the climax of a 26-year-long observation campaign using ESO’s telescopes in Chile.

Scientists discovered a new space-borne mineral in the Uakit meteorite from Russia. The new mineral is very hard but still not as hard as a diamond.

Mission success would open the door to the third flight of a Falcon 9 rocket.

Such an instrument could allow researchers to look for extraterrestrial microbial life directly.

The humble rock is but one of about 780,000 known asteroids in our solar system. So why did scientists pick Bennu for this momentous investigation? Here are 10 reasons.

A Japanese spacecraft has arrived at a diamond-shaped asteroid on a key fact-finding mission.

Scientific American speaks with a crew member from a NASA simulation of a long-duration space mission

The temperature of the moon rose and now we know why: The astronauts did it.

This summer, NASA's Parker Solar Probe will launch to travel closer to the Sun, deeper into the solar atmosphere, than any mission before it. If Earth was at one end of a yard-stick and the Sun on the other, Parker Solar Probe will make it to within four inches of the solar surface.

Big-data statistics have revealed, among other things, that our own solar system is kind of an oddball

Researchers believe they have found the first existing body of liquid water on the Red Planet.

CFCs, the harmful ozone-depleting chemicals banned back in the 1980s, are experiencing a mysterious comeback

The Parker Solar Probe is going to go closer to the sun than any spacecraft has come before. It will take seven years to fly 93 million miles to reach the sun’s corona, its outermost atmosphere. The probe will withstand temperatures up to 2,500º F as it gathers data about how energy and heat travel through the corona and what’s up with solar wind. We meet the engineer whose work on the heat shield will protect the probe from being burnt to a crisp as it makes history.

A bizarre rogue planet without a star is roaming the Milky Way just 20 light-years from Earth. And according to a recently published study in The Astrophysical Journal, this strange, nomadic world h

The global dust storm on Mars could soon let in enough sunlight for the Opportunity rover to recharge.

Nasa has found an entire solar system with as many planets as our own. The discovery of a new planet around the Kepler-90 star, which looks like our own sun, means the distant solar system has a total of eight known planets. And those planets look like those in our own neighbourhood: rocky planets orbit close to the star, with gas giants further away.

Across the cislunar blackness, we set sail for a landing that almost didn't happen.

Scientists have uncovered a rare relic from the early universe: the farthest known supermassive black hole. This matter-eating beast is 800 million times the mass of our Sun, which is astonishingly large for its young age. Researchers report the find in the journal Nature.

A great way to put an experimental stealthy craft into orbit is to imply that it never even made it there in the first place.

Meteorite hunters who flocked to Detroit from across the U.S. after a meteor exploded are finding the fragments.

"Kudos to the administration for beginning the debate."

A visual history of satellites.

You can tell because it's chock-full of planetary metals.

Since the Universe is big and old, and life on Earth didn't take relatively long to evolve, then life should be everywhere in the Universe.

The new SpaceX rocket seriously undercuts its competitors.

NASA's long-lived Mars rover Opportunity has just rolled past another big milestone — 5,000 days on the Red Planet.

Victor Buso, a locksmith in Argentina, photographed a supernova at the earliest stage ever seen, which has revealed clues about how stars explode.

Our universe may have started with the big bang, but it took time for stars to form. Now scientists believe they've captured the first clues to when that happened.

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have discovered key conditions that give rise to fast magnetic reconnection, the process that triggers solar flares, auroras, and geomagnetic storms that can disrupt signal transmissions and other electrical activities, including cell phone service.

Early Earth may have been smashed into a vapour by a Mars-sized object. Our moon may have formed at the edges of the leftover doughnut-shaped cloud of debris