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Far out in space, far beyond the orbits of Neptune and Pluto, beyond even that of Sedna, lies a vast cloud of ice and dust.

This cloud…

Ours is not an empty world.

Artists sometimes speak of horror vacui, the idea that nature abhors a vacuum. Humans certainly do. Emptiness – the blank…

For a few hours, it seemed close to the nightmare scenario.

On June 5, mission control in Houston directed the astronauts on board the International Space Station to take emergency shelter. In a moment of high drama, five of them entered a docked Dragon capsule and…

“The next time the world tunes in to watch astronauts fly around the Moon”, NASA boss Jared Isaacman said on May 19, “they will be taikonauts”.

China has not yet announced any such mission,…

The stars are far, almost unimaginably so.

In 1970, as the crew of Apollo 13 fell back towards Earth, they briefly hit a speed of almost twenty-five thousand miles per hour. This is the fastest…

For most of its known history, nobody has cared much about 2002 XV93. It is a small world lying somewhere just beyond the orbit of Pluto, one presumably covered in a grey and gritty kind of ice, and…

In 1839, Louis Daguerre took the first photograph of the Moon.

The details of this image have been lost to the mists of time. A fire destroyed the laboratory and much of the work of Daguerre just weeks after it was made. The photograph of the Moon was one of…

Where did the comet 3I/Atlas come from?

It was not born in our solar system. Instead, the comet came from the stars: it is passing through our system of planets at high speed, moving so fast that although the Sun…