SPACE

China successfully launched its first heavy-lift rocket, Long March 5, after 10 years of research on Thursday.

Australia’s Deep Space Station 43 (DSS 43), the giant 70 metre antenna dish will play a crucial in unprecedented glimpse of Jupiter. It will lock on to NASA’s Juno probe on Sunday night it navigates Jupiter’s thick toxic clouds n an attempt to uncover more clues as the origins of our solar system.

A “second Earth,” orbiting our planet’s closest star may have the right conditions to sustain alien life forms, astronomers have revealed. The mystery world spotted by experts at the European Southern Observatory may finally answer if we are alone in the universe. The planet circles the “goldilocks zone” of Proxima Centauri, the red dwarf star just four light years away.

Astronomers have spotted a young star, almost 11,000 light years away, that can help scientists understand how massive stars in our Universe form. The young star is still gathering materials from its parent molecular cloud and is currently 30 times the mass of the sun. When it finally reaches adulthood, it will be even more massive.

In a world-first study, Australian researchers have calculated the proportion of our suntan that comes from beyond the Milky Way. This skin-tanning, natural radiation comes not from the sun but distant hungry black holes and stars and is known as intergalactic solarium. This alien radiation is also known as extra-galactic background light that that gives the tan. This alien light well beyond our galaxy helps beachgoers get that tanned bronze.

NASA thinks Venus may have looked like Earth once. It was a planet capable of life, with a shallow liquid-water ocean and habitable surface temperature for up to two billion years.

Australian researchers are taking a historic step forward as the Qb-50 project is set to launch its first Aussie mini-satellites in space from International Space Station (ISS) next year. The project will study Earth’s thermosphere as it is the least-understood layer of our atmosphere. Researchers from three Australian universities are getting ready to make history as they prepare to measure the density and temperature of plasma in that region.

Astronomers have reportedly discovered the most-desolate place in the Milky Way. The vast expanse right at the centre could well be a cosmic desert that is completely devoid of young stars. The new study by the international team of researchers promises to better the understanding of the entire Milky Way.

It will be a double delight for stargazers as North Wales would allow them a chance to not only witness the Perseid meteor shower but also spot Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, Venus and Mercury this August. The five planets would be aligned along with the famous Perseid meteor shower, a perfect treat for stargazers.

New reports on asteroid Bennu suggest that Earth won’t be hit. The odds of the asteroid hitting earth are 1 in 2,700 and it would take 150 years to do so. Moreover, to reach the odds, Bennu would have to be gravitationally nudged from its current course when it passes between Earth and moon.

Researchers have revealed that all life as we see today descended from a microbe about four billion years ago. The microbe adapted itself to survive mineral-rich, oxygen-free and warm environments.

SpaceX is all set to send fresh cargo to the International Space Station (ISS) and it will include a handheld DNA sequencer that may one day help in detecting alien life forms.

A gap in the sun’s magnetic field is allowing heat from the star to escape into space. Discovered by NASA, the mysterious coronal hole may cause communications chaos on Earth.

Astronomers have discovered a new dwarf planet beyond Neptune and it circles our sun in a wide orbit. The scientists have made the discovery via a telescope at the top of Mauna Kea, Hawaii.

Scientists have revealed in a new study that a “Frankenstein” galaxy, formed from parts of other galaxies, is younger on its inside than the outside. UGC 1382 is situated about 250 million light years away and is seven times wider than out galaxy Milky Way.

An international team of scientists have recently discovered a strange planet in a faraway solar system that has not one but three suns. The planet, named HD 131399Ab, is way weirder than Luke Skywalker’s home planet Tatooine in the Star Wars saga that orbited around two suns.

NASA's Huygens and Cassini missions have revealed that Saturn’s moon Titan may support non-water-based life. The missions provided invaluable data on chemical elements found on Titan, and Cornell scientists have been able to find a chemical trail that suggests that prebiotic conditions may exist there.

Lab experiments have revealed that the chemistry of Mercury’s most ancient plains was likely forged near the planet’s core. NASA researchers said that Mercury’s surface feature originated from intense heating and crushing of rock 400 kilometres down, where the planet’s mantle meets the iron core.

Astronomers have found out that a mysterious source of radio waves thought to be from a different galaxy is actually a binary star system containing a black hole and a low mass star. The discovery suggests that a huge number of black holes in our Galaxy Milky Way have gone unnoticed.

MIT geologists have studied part of planet Mercury’s cooling history right after it formed between 4.2-3.7 billion years ago and traced its origins to an enstatite chondrite, a rare meteorite. This kind of meteorite is extremely rare on Earth.

British researchers have developed a perfume that smells like a comet, particularly the 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, on which the European Space Agency (ESA) touched down in 2014.

Scientists led by Durham University's Institute for Computational Cosmology captured gravitational waves via space-based detectors, and now they believe that these waves can help identify the origins of supermassive black holes. The scientist ran massive cosmological simulations that may be used to predict the rate at which gravitational waves caused by collisions between the monster black holes might be detected.

Scientists have discovered pieces of opal in a meteorite in Antarctica. The findings are extremely important for related studies on water and its life-forming abilities. According to a team of British researchers, the opal-studded meteorite is offering new clues as to the origins of life on Earth.

Researchers from Wageningen University in the Netherlands have revealed that cereals and vegetables they grew in “Martian” soil for two years are safe for human consumption. The Dutch researchers successfully raised peas, radishes, tomatoes and rye in soil that was made to match that of the red planet. This has provided researchers the hope of growing food on Mars. The food grown was found to contain “no dangerous levels” of heavy metals.

The Delta Aquarid meteor shower is coming, and Australians will be able to view the celestial event after its peak in late July. Like the recent Eta Aquarid meteor shower in May, the Delta Aquarid will be most visible in the Southern Hemisphere.

Astronomers from the University of Michigan and University of Maryland have for the first time mapped the flow of gas near a supermassive black hole, Swift J1644+57, that woke from its dormant state to destroy and devour a star that drifted close to it. The astronomers are the first to document X-rays bouncing from deep within the walls of the black hole’s newly-formed accretion disk after a tidal disruption event.

A Caribbean Sea study by ocean scientists from the University of Liverpool has revealed something very interesting. They discovered an area in the ocean that behaves like a whistle amidst all the noise of the ocean. The whistle is so loud that the noise can be heard from space in the form of oscillations of the Earth's gravity field.

NASA has reported that an “electric wind” can strip Earth-like planets of oceans and atmosphere. The statement came after it was found out that planet Venus has an electric wind that is strong enough to remove components of water from its upper atmosphere.

A team of international researchers have discovered the youngest fully-formed exoplanet ever known. The exoplanet orbits a young star 500 light years from Earth.