Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin will launch its first orbital rocket “no earlier than Friday”, it said, a pivotal moment in the commercial space race currently dominated by Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

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Getting a spacecraft to another star is a monumental challenge. However, that doesn’t stop people from working on it. The most visible groups currently doing so are Breakthrough Starshot and the Tau Zero Foundation, both of whom focus on a very particular type of propulsion-beamed power.

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At the start of this new year, we look back at close-up pictures and solar flare data recorded by the ESA-led Solar Orbiter mission over the last three years. See and hear for yourself how the number of flares and their intensity increase, a clear sign of the sun approaching the peak of the 11-year […]

Billions of years ago, in the frigid outer reaches of our solar system, two icy worlds collided. Rather than destroying each other in a cosmic catastrophe, they spun together like a celestial snowman, finally separating while remaining forever linked in orbit. This is how Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, originated, according to a University […]

Outer space is infinite, but that hasn’t stopped humans trying to impose their laws on it. There are more ways for people to travel to space than ever before, and the next few decades are likely to see the US and China sending humans to the moon again.

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Using the VLT Survey Telescope (VST), astronomers from Italy and Germany have observed a group of galaxies designated NGC 5018. Results of the observational campaign, published Dec. 23 on the pre-print server arXiv, yield important insights into the globular cluster system of this group.

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Looking halfway across the observable universe and expecting to see individual stars is considered a non-starter in astronomy, a bit like raising a pair of binoculars at the moon in hopes of making out individual grains of dust inside its craters. Thanks to a cosmic quirk of nature, however, an international team of astronomers did […]