Saturn’s lightning 10,000 times more powerful than Earth’s

I love being in the middle of a thunderstorm - being in the center of the light, noise and heavy rain is a really exhilarating experience. But new research from NASA’s Cassini probe makes me think that maybe Saturn would be an even better place to experience a massive storm.
Why? Saturn’s storms not only have [...]

Where is the brightest place on Earth?

Where’s the brightest place on Earth - the place that is illuminated most when the Sun has gone down? New York’s Times Square perhaps… what about the glow of office lights around London’s business district… or maybe the bustling heart of Mumbai, the world’s most populated city. They’re all pretty bright, but of course nothing [...]

NASA’s new image of the stars that shouldn’t exist

Beautiful, isn’t it? But I think it also looks a bit weird compared to most galaxies. Lots of scientists think it’s strange too, although not just because of what it looks like.
Until now it was thought that the majority of stars always form in the centers of galaxies, because that’s where most of the star-forming [...]

NASA’s twins that could save our world

Imagine a billion tonnes of scorching hot gas and radiation being hurled toward you - it’s not the sort of thing you come across every day.
This is actually something our Sun does on a regular basis, although fortunately for us our atmosphere stops anything too dangerous getting in and hurting us.
But satellites, as well [...]

NASA captures a new 3D view of Mars’s moon Phobos

You’d think that Mars’s moon Phobos - a 13.5-mile wide lump of brownish rock full of craters - wouldn’t be the most interesting place in the Solar System to take photos. But then space exploration does tend to throw up a lot of surprises.
One of NASA’s Mars probes recently captured the above image, and [...]