NASA awards $2 million to advance rainbow-coloured solar sail project

As part of its Innovative Advanced Concepts programme, NASA has given a major award to a team working on solar sails that can move in any direction using ridges that diffract light like prisms do

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Bricks made of dust from the Moon and Mars could make space buildings

Baking a mixture of saltwater and materials that mimic dust from the moon or Mars at a high temperature produced sturdy bricks that could be used to build human habitats in space

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One in every 50 planets may have been stolen from other stars

Planets can be snatched from one solar system by another in the early lives of stars born in dense clusters of dust and gas

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Watch out for comet SW3, which might cause a meteor shower in late May

Here's hoping that a meteor shower predicted by astronomers for almost a century will be seen this month, says Abigail Beall

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Boeing's Starliner spacecraft launches to ISS despite thruster issue

At the moment, only SpaceX is able to launch astronauts to the International Space Station from US soil, but Boeing hopes to change that with an uncrewed test of its Starliner spacecraft

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Astronomers question if the first picture of a black hole is accurate

The Event Horizon Telescope’s first image of a black hole showed a distinctive ring feature, but a reanalysis of their data has raised concerns over whether that ring of light is real

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Why the next big solar storm might hit Earth without warning

A big solar storm could fry the internet, but at least space weather forecasts would give us a day or two to prepare. Or maybe not, because physicists have just discovered a new kind of solar storm that strikes without notice

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Boeing's Starliner spacecraft is ready to launch to the ISS

At the moment, only SpaceX is able to launch astronauts to the International Space Station from US soil, but Boeing hopes to change that with an uncrewed test of its Starliner spacecraft

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Pairs of giant planets may make their star systems ultra-habitable

Simulations of more than 140,000 possible planetary systems show that pairs of giant planets like Jupiter and Saturn may make their star systems more hospitable to habitable Earth-like worlds

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What's next for Event Horizon Telescope after its black hole pictures?

Now that the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration has released its image of the Milky Way's black hole, the team is focusing on making movies of the two photographed black holes and finding other distant black holes large enough to study

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