When the Soviet Union lands on the moon first people in the US are shocked. But For All Mankind provides an even bigger surprise when one cosmonaut's identity is revealed, says Emily Wilson

Astronomers have spotted an asteroid that has been captured by Earth's gravity, making it a temporary mini-moon. It will probably fly away again in April

China’s Yutu-2 rover has used radar to peer 40 metres under the surface of the far side of the moon and revealed how past impacts have shaped its geology

Earth’s atmosphere thankfully provides air for us to breathe, but when trying to study interesting objects in space it causes all sorts of problems, writes Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

A private satellite that is low on fuel could survive five more years because another satellite has come to its rescue – a technique that could be used by future service spacecraft

A huge black hole in a distant galaxy caused the largest explosion we have ever seen, with the energy of 10 billion suns – and it isn't clear why it was so big

SpaceX is partnering with a US start-up called Axiom Space to launch three space tourists on a 10-day trip to the International Space Station

In the early universe, particles called neutrinos had a starring role in determining where galaxy clusters formed and which elements were created when stars exploded

A huge black hole from when the universe was less than a billion years old is shooting a powerful jet at Earth, and studying it could help us understand the young cosmos

A leading theory for the formation of the moon is that a planet called Theia smashed into the early Earth, but doubts remain. Now a new analysis of lunar rock supports this idea

Our images of deep space are spectacular, but don’t reflect what our eyes would see. Here's what their stunning true colours reveal about the cosmos

Our measurements of the Hubble constant can't seem to come up with a consistent answer. What we learn next may alter our view of the cosmos, writes Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

When Earth and Venus formed, they both had global magma oceans deep underground. Earth’s has turned solid by now, but Venus’s may still remain hidden

Some black holes are way bigger than we can explain, and they may have come from supermassive stars that formed by devouring the other stars around them

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, who discovered that hydrogen dominates our universe, finally gets the recognition she deserves in a rich biography, What Stars Are Made Of

An unusually round and symmetrical deposit on Mars may be the result of an impact that popped the surface of the planet, causing a volcanic eruption less than 200,000 years ago

An enormous rocky planet orbiting a distant star may be a gas giant that has had its atmosphere ripped off, which could help us understand how huge worlds like Jupiter form

An explosion 4.6 billion light years away has released 10 times more energy than the sun will put out in its lifetime, making it the most extreme supernova ever found

Spending at least six months in microgravity can cause astronauts’ brain volumes to increase, causing pressure to build up in their heads and creating vision problems

A star that swoops close to the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole has a strange, looping orbit that proves Einstein was right about the gravity of black holes

Strange orbits of distant space rocks have been used to infer that the solar system has an unseen ninth planet, but those orbits may be less strange than we thought, meaning there is no need for a new planet

Extraterrestrial oceans are an obvious place to search for alien life, but getting there and having a look won't be easy, says NASA's Kevin Hand in his book Alien Oceans

New images reveal threads of ultra-hot gas woven throughout the sun's corona, in the most detailed look at previously unseen parts of the atmosphere of our closest star

The question of how the brain gives rise to subjective experience is the hardest of all. Mathematicians think they can help, but their first attempts have thrown up some eye-popping conclusions

NASA has awarded $967 million to three space flight companies – Blue Origin, Dynetics and SpaceX – to build lunar landers that will be part of the Artemis programme to send humans to the moon by 2024

Stars that are similar to the sun in every way we can measure are mostly more active than the sun, which hints that the sun’s activity may ramp up someday, risking solar eruptions

From vintage satellites to lunar rovers, space archaeologist Alice Gorman is teasing out a unique history of humanity from the objects we've dispatched from Earth

China just tested its biggest rocket yet, along with a new capsule designed to carry humans to its planned space station, the moon and beyond

Astronomers found a star that appeared to be orbiting nothing at all – but it’s actually the closest black hole ever at just 1000 light years away

The leading hypothesis for how the moon formed involves a collision between a Mars-sized object and Earth that would have boiled away elements like carbon, making its discovery on the moon a mystery

Mercury is much denser than the other rocky planets in the solar system, and that may be because a collision vaporised its surface and the debris was blown away by the sun

About 80 per cent of stars in the Milky Way’s central bulge have relatively close encounters with another star, which can fling off any planets orbiting them

In 1847, members of the Choctaw Nation sent relief money across the Atlantic to a starving Ireland - something the Irish, who lost more than a million people in a famine made worse by British indifference, have never forgotten. The Irish are now giving financial aid to Native American tribes hit with a pandemic that has been made worse by American incompetence.

The Trump-Russia collusion investigation was an elaborate and intentional hoax, staged by the most unscrupulous and power-mad political operatives this country has ever seen.

New labor economy data paints a fuller - and bleaker - picture of the economy.

The country faces the same problem today it did two months ago: There are not enough tests to contain the virus.

Your weekly selection of awesome robot videos

How autonomous robots in the underground scavenger hunt pick up points for their teams

Ready-to-connect readycables® save you time on cable assembly and are guaranteed to last 36 months

Supporting long-range communications inside of a mine is extremely difficult, so DARPA SubT teams are trying out some creative approaches

Startup Cerebras has built a wafer-size chip for AI, but it isn’t the only one possible

A new automated lab bench combs through known chemical reactions to figure out how best to synthesize compounds

It's about more than just first place as teams look toward more competitions in 2020

Lab demoes of an all-optical neural network could lead to more powerful and less power-hungry AI

The creators of Kiki believe they can build an emotionally engaging social home robot that is also "completely useless"

Lucas Joppa, founder of Microsoft's AI for Earth program, is taking an engineering approach to environmental issues

Rigid IT departments and job-hopping data scientists are just two of the challenges that make implementing machine learning harder than you might think

In their search for killer apps, robotics companies should look at the amazing evolution of computers

For the first time, NASA's Astrobee robot has demonstrated autonomous free flight in space

A startup led by robotics veterans is announcing a pre-seed funding round with participation from Amazon's Alexa Fund and iRobot Ventures