The faster-than-light neutrinos seen by the OPERA particle physics experiment last year may have just been explained. By a loose cable. I wish I was joking. To back up a little, the OPERA collaboration based at the Gran Sasso laboratory underneath the mountain of the same name in Italy published a paper to pre-print server [...]

Judging by the many flares erupting from the sun at the moment, it is well on track to reach its next peak in activity early next year. As this peak approaches, we can expect many more huge bursts of energy that erupt from the sun and send lots of energetic particles, and sometimes magnetic fields, [...]

Fed up of simply reading about space and want to do some real science? Well, here’s your chance: astronomers are asking anyone with a pair of binoculars or telescope to train them on a new object visible in the night sky. The object is an asteroid called 433 Eros. At 20 miles wide it’s one [...]

The Sun is hotting up, and we can see the results right here on Earth. Across the northern hemisphere, fantastic light displays have been visible of late, and the frequency of these events is set only to increase as the Sun heads toward a peak in its magnetic activity. In light of this (no pun [...]

Underneath Titan’s dense atmosphere lies something rather unusual, by terrestrial standards. Some features of the Saturnian moon, at first glance, might look similar to some features we have on Earth — it is the only other body in the solar system with lakes, and appears to have an active weather system. But instead of water, [...]

Astronomers have found that the core of a red giant, the type of star that our Sun will eventually become, spins ten times as fast as its surface. And it happens because of a phenomenon we can see here on Earth, too. You have probably seen a figure skater perform a so-called ‘scratch spin’, where [...]

They may come from completely different fields of study, but brain scans and supernovae have more in common than you would think. In a new TED talk, Michelle Borkin explains how software developed for use in a hospital was able to help astronomers study the structure of supernovae. An astronomer colleague of Borkin’s at the [...]

2011 has been a busy year for particle physicists. They’ve found a new particle, closed in on the elusive Higgs boson, and witnessed some neutrinos acting pretty strangely, amongst other things. I’m talking, of course, about the faster than light neutrinos detected by the Opera experiment in Italy. They dominated the science headlines for a [...]

When a star becomes a white dwarf — an old, extremely dense star that would have once been similar to our own Sun — the eventful part of its life is over. It releases what heat and light it has left over billions of years, slowly cooling until it no longer shines. Usually. Some white [...]

How did the Christmas gamma-ray burst explode? No, it’s not a geeky Christmas cracker joke, it’s a real question scientists have been trying to answer since Christmas day last year, when a gamma-ray burst called GRB 101225A first lit up the sky. The Christmas burst, as its come to be known, exhibted some rather unusual [...]