The Quadrantid meteor shower has a short peak period that lasts only a few hours, so midnight on 3 January is the best time to view in the UK

A neutron star has produced gravitational waves after colliding with an unknown object – it could be the smallest black hole or biggest neutron star ever found

Two stars in the constellation Sagitta are predicted to smash together in the year 2083, producing an explosion that will outshine every star in the sky

China has connected the world’s first portable ground station for quantum communication to the Mozi satellite, and has plans to launch another quantum satellite soon

At the centre of our galaxy, six strange clouds that look like dust and gas orbit a black hole so closely that if they were really just clouds they should have been sucked in by now

The brains behind the first plant ever to germinate on the moon explains how the Chinese mission succeeded

Astrology is bunk, but a new book exploring its ancient history argues that it has crucial lessons for today's data science with its seemingly opaque algorithms

The Solar Orbiter spacecraft, set to launch on 7 February, will give us our first clear views of the sun’s poles and help unravel the mystery of the solar wind

How can we get a picture of the whole Milky Way if we are inside it? Good sleuthing is needed to combine all the clues, writes Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

Einstein’s theory of relativity predicts that fast-spinning objects stretch space and time around them, and we’ve watched that effect make a pair of stars wobble

Astronomers have spotted a star that is exploding with a brightness 100 times less than expected – and it’s a mystery exactly why the explosion is so dim

In our atmosphere, strange dense patches of charged air sometimes bounce radio waves around and disrupt radar – and now they have been spotted on Mars

Every day on Pluto, nitrogen puffs out the icy world’s heart-shaped plain into the atmosphere, and every night it refreezes, creating winds unlike any we’ve seen before

Strange, powerful blasts of radio waves from space called fast radio bursts sometimes flash repeatedly, but never with any discernible pattern – until now

NASA's Juno spacecraft has found that Jupiter contains more water than measured by its predecessor, Galileo, solving a long-running planetary mystery

Young Mars may have endured a series of huge collisions that smashed its mantle, throwing off our measurements of when it formed by up to 15 million years

The International Astronomical Union has concluded a review of satellite mega constellations such as SpaceX's Starlink satellites and found they will have a major impact on large telescopes, but not naked eye astronomy

For the first time, astronomers have spotted an exoplanet by detecting radio waves generated by interactions with its parent star

SpaceX and the space tourism firm Space Adventures have announced a plan to fly paying customers into Earth orbit, higher than the International Space Station

There’s nothing like crash-landing on an alien planet. Journey to the Savage Planet doesn't always get it right, but it has echoes of classic Metroid Prime, says Jacob Aron

We’ve spotted strange blasts of radio waves from space in a pattern that may be produced by a magnetised neutron star wobbling as it spins

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

NASA’s InSight lander has been on the surface of Mars for over a year now – here are five of its strangest and most fascinating discoveries from the Red Planet

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 space flight start-up called Astra is about to attempt to launch two small rockets into orbit over a few weeks to win $12 million from the US military

White dwarf stars are common in the galaxy, but astronomers have found one that doesn't seem to obey the rules. They think it was born when two smaller white dwarfs merged together

A team of researchers say they have discovered a protein molecule inside a meteorite, the first extraterrestrial example ever found, but others are sceptical

Out of 28,000 suggestions, NASA selected the name Perseverance for its Mars 2020 rover, which will search for signs of life on the Red Planet

Lettuce grown on the International Space Station has been served with tacos and cheeseburgers, and it turns out to be just as nutritious as the Earth-grown version

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

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

Exoplanet WASP-76b, which is about 390 light years from the solar system, has a strange iron signature in its atmosphere, suggesting the metal is raining down on the planet's night side

Proxima Centauri b, a planet orbiting our nearest stellar neighbour, is being blasted with cosmic rays and solar flares – which could make it warm enough to host life

Venus’s surface is covered in strange wiggling lines that may form when colossal stacks of lava are carved by gentle winds over hundreds of millions of years

A tiny meteorite found in Antarctica doesn’t match any asteroid or comet we know of. Instead, it must have come from a mystery parent body that’s full of water

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

Pluto’s ancient oceans may have come about just after the icy world was born, melting from ice in a process that suggests the dwarf planet took just 30,000 years to form

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

Thousands of dead satellites and chunks of debris in orbit are a threat to active satellites, but rockets that launch clouds of talcum powder may prevent a disastrous collision

Strange particles observed by an experiment in Antarctica could be evidence of an alternative reality where everything is upside down

Brown dwarfs, which are halfway between huge planets and small stars, have extremely powerful winds whipping around them at speeds of about 650 metres per second

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

We know that there is at least one planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to our solar system, and now astronomers may have taken the first picture of a second world

The coronavirus pandemic is making life feel slower than ever, but observing timescales across the universe can bring us some comfort, writes Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

A bunch of asteroids near Jupiter and Neptune with orbits perpendicular to the plane of the solar system may have come here from a different star system

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