Astronomy Trek News: Stay Updated on Cosmic Discoveries

New InSight Spacecraft to Study Interior Structure of Mars

The image above shows an artists’ impression of the deployed InSight spacecraft on the surface of Mars. The craft was launched from the west coast of the USA on May 5. 2018, after a two-year …

Earth’s Water Supply Survived Moon-Forming Impact

James Miller

The image above shows an artist’s impression of the impact between Earth and a Mars-sized object in an event that is widely accepted as the mechanism that formed Earth’s Moon only about 100 million years …

Tens of Thousands of Black Holes Found in the Milky Way

James Miller

The image above shows the Milky Way stretching across the sky, with Sgr A*, the area of space that contains both the center of the galaxy and a super massive black hole, directly above the …

Bad News for Life on Exoplanets

James Miller

It is known that red dwarf stars account for about 75% of all the stars in the Milky Way, and astronomers generally agree that red dwarfs are likely to occur in similar numbers in most …

Cosmic Forensics Solves Long-standing Mystery

James Miller

The image above shows detail of the Leading Arm, an enormous stream of gas and dust that connects the Milky Way and its two closest satellite galaxies, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. Note the …

Asteroids and Comets Are Showering Mars with Organic Material

James Miller

The image above shows a fresh crater on Mars surrounded by a blanket of ejected material; as impacts on Mars go, this particular example is very young, having occurred sometime between January 2014 and August …

The Late, Great Stephen Hawking: 1942-2018

James Miller

At the time of writing, the news of the death of Stephen Hawking CH CBE FRS FRSA has reverberated around the world. Widely regarded as the greatest cosmologist of all time, Hawking was the Director …

Is There Life in Europa’s Subsurface Ocean?

James Miller

The image above shows the interior structure of Europa, a major moon of the planet Jupiter, but the smallest of its four Galilean moons. The band of blue in the picture depicts a 100 km-thick …

Amateur Astrophotographer Captures Rare Supernova Shot

James Miller

Photographing a supernova in the process of erupting is notoriously difficult to do because it is impossible to predict the exact moment of the phenomenon, and its very first burst of light. In fact, the …

Tabby’s Star and the Alien Megastructure Theory Debunked

James Miller

There’s a star located 1,280 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus that has been confusing astronomers ever since it was discovered in 2015 during the Kepler mission. The star, officially called KIC 8462852, is 50% …