We're Going Back to Venus! NASA Announces Two New Missions by 2030

NASA announced two new missions to Venus on Wednesday that will launch at the end of the decade and are aimed at learning how Earth's nearest planetary neighbor became a hellscape while our own thrived.

"These two sister missions both aim to understand how Venus became an inferno-like world, capable of melting lead at the surface," said Bill Nelson, the agency's newly-confirmed administrator...

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China's Advanced 'Artificial Sun' Fusion Reactor Just Broke a New World Record

China has achieved a new milestone in humanity's experiments to harness the power of the stars.

On Friday, the Chinese Academy of Sciences' fusion machine reached 120 million degrees Celsius and clung onto this for 101 seconds...

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In Surprise Discovery, Astronomers Find Huge Star Cluster in Our Cosmic Backyard

A huge cluster of stars has been found lurking in the Milky Way, just a relatively short cosmic distance from our own Solar System.

Now around 75 million years old, the open cluster Valparaíso 1 is estimated to have contained around 10,000 solar masses' worth of stars when it first blazed into existence...

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Astronomers May Have Just Detected a New Magnetar!

A new discovery could soon be raising the total number of confirmed magnetars to 25.
On 3 June, a brief X-ray burst close to the galactic plane caught the attention of the Swift Burst Alert Telescope (BAT). Follow-up observation and analysis seem to confirm that it was emitted by a previously unknown magnetar, now named Swift J1555.2-5402...

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NASA’s InSight Mars Lander Gets a Power Boost

The spacecraft successfully cleared some dust off its solar panels, helping to raise its energy and delay when it will need to switch off its science instruments.

The team behind NASA’s InSight Mars lander has come up with an innovative way to boost the spacecraft’s energy at a time when its power levels have been falling. The lander’s robotic arm trickled sand near one solar panel, helping the wind to carry off some of the panel’s dust. The result was a gain of about 30 watt-hours of energy per sol, or Martian day...

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A Giant 'Blinking' Star Has Been Detected Near Our Galaxy's Center

Some 25,000 light-years from Earth, astronomers have found a weird star that almost blinked out of existence for several months before reappearing.

"It's amazing that we just observed a dark, large and elongated object pass between us and the distant star and we can only speculate what its origin is," said astronomer Sergey Koposov...

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Physicists Observe Particles Switch Between Matter and Antimatter

Antimatter, which is differentiated by having the opposite charge to normal matter, is composed of the antiparticles of normal matter.

In a world-first discovery, it was found that the charm meson, a subatomic particle made out of a charm quark and an antiquark, can travel as a mixture of their particle and antiparticle states, all the while spontaneously switching between the two...

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