Outer space

Scientists from the University of Edinburgh believe that life on Earth may have been carried by streams of cosmic dust, Phys.org reports.

More powerful earthquakes could rock the globe in 2018 because of infinitesimal changes in the speed of the Earth’s rotation, scientists warn.

It seems contradictory, but a minuscule slowing of the Earth’s rotation over years, which can extend the length of a day by a millisecond or more, appears to be linked to an increase in major quakes.

An asteroid that visited us from interstellar space is one of the most elongated cosmic objects known to science, a study has shown, reported BBC.

Discovered on 19 October, the object's speed and trajectory strongly suggested it originated in a planetary system around another star.

In line with its space program, the Chinese space agency plans to build a reuseable missile, super-heavy rocket and space shuttle over the next 20 years.

The first goal is Next Generation Chanchion to be launched by 2020. Its purpose is to use it as a cheap light rocket to extract relatively small satellites in low-Earth orbit.

Last year, Russian scientist Igor Ashurbeyli announced the formation of Asgardia -a new virtual nation that will ultimately exist entirely in space. Since its debut, Asgardia has attracted over 300,000 registrants, created a constitution and, as of this Sunday, launched itself -all 0.5 TB of it- into space.

Astronomers have found a cool, Earth-sized planet that's relatively close to our Solar System, reported BBC. 

The properties of this newly discovered planet - called Ross 128 b - make it a prime target in the search for life elsewhere in the cosmos.

At just 11 light-years away, it's the second closest exoplanet of its kind to Earth.

Debris from the Tiangong-1 Chinese space station is likely to fall between 42 and 43 parallel in the northern hemisphere, warns Holger Krag in a press release from the European Space Agency, reports Nova TV. This is expected to happen between January and March next year.

Scientists have spotted a gigantic exoplanet that they believe is hiding deep at the center of the Milky Way, about 22,000 light-years away from Earth, a large team is reporting in a paper recently posted on the physics pre-print server arxiv and submitted to The Astrophysical Journal.

Stephen Hawking has warned that the human race will perish on Earth after we turn it into a sizzling fireball in less than 600 years.
He declared that humans must “boldly go where no one has gone before” if we fancy continuing our species for another million years.

What you’re looking at is not a production set photo from Gravity, but rather a training simulation for Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen. He’s suspended over a mockup of the International Space Station (ISS), while attached to the Active Response Gravity Offload System (ARGOS) at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.