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Imagine parallel parking a 15-passenger van into just two to three parking spaces surrounded by two-story boulders. On October 20, a University of Arizona-led NASA mission 16 years in the making will attempt the astronomical equivalent more than 200 million miles (320 million kilometres) away. A NASA mission called OSIRIS-REx will soon attempt to touch the surface of an asteroid and collect loose rubble. OSIRIS-REx is the United States' first asteroid sample return mission, aiming to collect and carry a pristine, unaltered sample from an asteroid back to Earth for scientific study. The spacecraft will attempt to touch the surface...

Fusion power is the technology that is 30 years away, and always will be, according to skeptics, at least. Despite its difficult transition into a reliable power source, the nuclear reactions that power the sun have a wide variety of uses in other fields. The concept fusion drive, called a direct fusion drive (or DFD), is in development at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL). Though still under development, the engine itself exploits many of the advantages of aneutronic fusion, most notably an extremely high power-to-weight ratio. The fuel for a DFD drive can vary slightly in mass and contains...

Archaeologists working in the ancient Greek city of Soli Pompeipolis in the southern Mersin province in Turkey have unveiled the memorial tomb of the Greek poet and astronomer Aratus, who was born in 315 BC. The city, located in the ancient region of Paphlagonia, was still prominent during Roman times but was only rediscovered in the 1800s with the unearthing of the ruins of Zimbilli Tepe in the Black Sea region of the country. Soli Pompeipolis, lying just across the river from Tasköprü, in the Gökirmak (Greek: Amnias) Valley, in ancient times stretched as far as the Küre and ilgaz...

"There are 11 meteor showers peaking in October every year. Here the brief description of these awesome space events that will light up the autumn sky of October. Keep your eyes to the sky and enjoy!"

A Swedish expedition team has found an unidentified object at the bottom of the Baltic Sea, leaving some to believe it’s the remnants of an extra-terrestrial ship. Scientists went off on a deep-water dive to debunk some theories about the underwater object, but were left with more questions than they had answers. The divers found that the object was raised about 10 to 13 feet above the seabed, and curved in at the sides. “First we thought this was only stone, but this is something else,” Ocean X team diver Peter Lindberg said in a press release. The object had...

On June 19, maritime treasure hunters -- who were looking for priceless submerged hooch in shipwrecks -- discovered a 60-meter-diameter circle 87 meters under the Baltic Sea. Are these the remains of an alien vessel or Cthulhu's personal pan pizza? Next to the circle is a 300 meter long slide track -- as if the circle has traveled across the seabed before it has settled [...] They rule out theories that there is a depth bomb or mine from the First World War -- or a symmetrical [algal] bloom [...] The most likely scenario is still that there is a...

A mysterious circle on a grainy scan, this is what scientists are claiming is finally evidence that Earth has been visited by aliens. Researchers have claimed the fuzzy outline is a flying saucer that ended up 300ft down on the ocean floor between Sweden and Finland. They were stunned when sonar scans taken while searching for a century-old wreck showed up the shape against the dirt.

A team of salvage divers has discovered an unexplained object resting at the bottom of the Baltic Sea near Sweden. "This thing turned up. My first reaction was to tell the guys that we have a UFO here on the bottom," said Peter Lindberg, the leader of the amateur treasure hunters. Sonar readings show that the mysterious object is about 60 meters across, or, about the size of a jumbo jet. And it's not alone. Nearby on the sea floor is another, smaller object with a similar shape. Even more fascinating, both objects have "drag marks" behind them on the...

Deep down on the bottom of the Baltic Sea, Swedish treasure hunters think they have made the find of a lifetime. The problem is, they're not exactly sure what it is they've uncovered.

The Sideshow: A team of salvage divers has discovered an unexplained object resting at the bottom of the Baltic Sea near Sweden. “This thing turned up. My first reaction was to tell the guys that we have a UFO here on the bottom,” said Peter Lindberg, the leader of the treasure hunters. Sonar readings show that the mysterious object is about 60 meters across, or, about the size of a jumbo jet. And it’s not alone. Nearby on the sea floor is another, smaller object with a similar shape. Even more fascinating, both objects have “drag marks” behind them on...

Swedish scientists plan to explore a mystery ripped straight from the “The X-Files.” Rather than Mulder and Scully, this adventure features Swedish researchers Peter Lindberg and Dennis Asberg. They too know the truth is out there -- and in mere days plan to visit what they call the “Baltic Anomaly.” Last summer, while on a treasure hunt between Sweden and Finland, the pair and their research associates made headlines worldwide with the discovery of a 200-foot wide unidentified object at the bottom of the Baltic Sea. Now a team of oceanographers, engineers and deep sea divers will return to the...

Red dwarfs are the coolest kind of star. As such, they potentially allow liquid water to exist on planets that are quite close to them. In the search for habitable worlds beyond the borders of our solar system, this is a big advantage: the distance between an exoplanet and its star is a crucial factor for its detection. The closer the two are, the higher the chance that astronomers can detect the planet from Earth. "But these stars are rather small and emit little light compared to most other stars, such as our Sun," Brice-Olivier Demory, lead author of the...

Pluto as seen from data taken by New Horizon’s flyby in 2015 of the dwarf planet, with a close-up view of the Pigafetta Montes mountain range. The colorization on the right indicates the concentrations of methane ice, with the highest concentrations at higher elevations in red, decreasing downslope to the lowest concentrations in blue. Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI and Ames Research Center/Daniel Rutter ============================================================================= The mountains discovered on Pluto during the New Horizons spacecraft’s flyby of the dwarf planet in 2015 are covered by a blanket of methane ice, creating bright deposits strikingly like the snow-capped mountain chains found on Earth. New...

(ALMA - ESO/NAOJ/NRAO, E/O'Gorman/P.Kervella) ========================================================================= In the wake of recent fluctuations in Betelgeuse's brightness, astronomers have rigorously examined the star's vital statistics, and come up with a bit of a surprise. According to the team led by researchers at Australian National University (ANU), the results change a few important things about our favourite red giant. "The actual physical size of Betelgeuse has been a bit of a mystery – earlier studies suggested it could be bigger than the orbit of Jupiter," says astronomer László Molnár from the Konkoly Observatory in Hungary. "Our results say Betelgeuse only extends out to two...

Satellite-tracking company LeoLabs on Wednesday said the defunct objects could come within 39 feet of each other and that there was a 10% chance that they could still collide around 8:56 p.m. ET. The company deemed the potential crash to be a "very high risk." "This event continues to be very high risk and will likely stay this way through the time of closest approach," LeoLabs tweeted. Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said the two objects were a defunct Soviet navigation satellite called Parus [Kosmos 2004] that launched in 1989 and a Chinese rocket stage....

Image and amplification (in color) of the ultra-diffuse galaxy Dragonfly 44 taken with the Hubble space telescope. Credit: Teymoor Saifollahi and NASA/HST. ============================================================================= At present, the formation of galaxies is difficult to understand without the presence of a ubiquitous, but mysterious component, termed dark matter. Astronomers have measure how much dark matter there is around galaxies, and have found that it varies between 10 and 300 times the quantity of visible matter. However, a few years ago, the discovery of a very diffuse object, named Dragonfly 44, changed this view. It was found that this galaxy has 10,000 times more...

Explanation: Three very different -- and very famous -- objects were all captured in a single frame last month. On the upper left is the bright blue Pleiades, perhaps the most famous cluster of stars on the night sky. The Pleiades (M45) is about 450 light years away and easily found a few degrees from Orion. On the upper right is the expansive Andromeda Galaxy, perhaps the most famous galaxy -- external to our own -- on the night sky. Andromeda (M31) is one of few objects visible to the unaided eye where you can see light that is millions...

Mars reaches opposition today, Oct. 13, offering skywatchers an early Halloween treat. During opposition, Mars, Earth and the sun form a straight line, with Earth in the middle. As a result, the Red Planet appears bigger, brighter and redder than usual — and the planet won't get this close to Earth again until 2035, according to a statement from Sky & Telescope. While Mars will be at its maximum apparent size when viewed through a telescope, the Red Planet actually made its closest approach to Earth last week, on Oct. 6, when the two planets were separated by just 38.6...

Before humans first started sending objects into Earth orbit, the pocket of space around our planet was clear and clean. But the launch of Sputnik 1 in October of 1957 changed everything. Since then, the space debris has been accumulating, with the amount of useless, defunct satellites vastly outnumbering the operational objects in our orbit. A new annual report from the European Space Agency (ESA) has found that while we have become aware of the problem and taken steps in recent years to mitigate it, those steps are currently not keeping up with the sheer scale of space junk. All...

Explanation: What would it be like to land on an asteroid? Although no human has yet done it, NASA's robotic OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is scheduled to attempt to touch the surface of asteroid 101955 Bennu next week. The goal is to collect a sample from the nearby minor planet for return to Earth for a detailed analysis in 2023. The featured video shows what it looks like to descend toward the 500-meter diamond-shaped asteroid, based on a digital map of Bennu's rocky surface constructed from image and surface data taken by OSIRIS-REx over the past 1.5 years. The video begins by...