The Great Green Wall was pitched to the world in 2007 as an 8,000-kilometre living barrier — a corridor of trees running from Senegal on the Atlantic to Djibouti on the Red Sea, 15 kilometres wide, thick enough to hold back the advancing Sahara.
Time travel into the future sounds like a fiction problem until it is written in the language of clocks.
GJ 251 c is the kind of planet astronomers have been trying to find for decades: nearby, relatively small, in a temperate orbit, and separated from its star just enough that future telescopes may not have to infer its existence only from a wobble.
Albert Einstein is so closely identified with relativity that it can feel natural to assume the Nobel Prize followed that theory.
The International Space Station is often described as being "up" in space, but that word can quietly mislead.
In almost seven decades of deep-sea exploration, the direct human view of the deep ocean floor is still smaller than many people would guess.
The best global maps of Mars, the Moon and Venus resolve finer detail than the best global map of our own seabed. A look at why, and how fast the gap is closing.
On February 18, 1930, Clyde Tombaugh found a moving point of light on two photographic plates taken at Lowell Observatory in Arizona.
A neutron star is one of the few objects in astronomy where the familiar scale of a city and the unfamiliar scale of nuclear physics meet in the same sentence.
Venus is usually introduced as the planet that makes Mars look gentle. Its surface is hot enough to melt lead, its pressure is comparable to being nearly a kilometre under Earth's ocean, and its clouds are chemically hostile.
Voyager 1 is already in interstellar space. NASA states that the spacecraft crossed into that region in August 2012, after passing beyond the heliopause: the…
Proxima Centauri b has a claim no other known exoplanet can match. It orbits the nearest star to the Sun, just over four light-years away, and it sits in the kind of orbit where liquid water could exist on a rocky surface.
In 2001, ahead of the opening of the National Space Centre in Leicester, a teenager on work experience was helping to prepare the exhibits.
NASA's Curiosity rover has added a more detailed layer to one of the hardest questions in Mars science: not whether ancient Mars was ever habitable, but how much chemical evidence can survive long enough for a rover to find it.
The first thing that happens to a body in orbit is that it starts to rearrange itself.
Give a person a diary, a tablet and a phone, ask them to write down the same set of appointments, then quiz them an hour later, and the one who used paper tends to recall the simpler details more reliably.
