The northern lights may not be exclusively northern any longer, according to a new study. Researchers at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory have discovered that, as the magnetic field of the planet continues to weaken, it will begin to affect how well solar winds bounce off of it. According to Tech Times, the scientists believe that and appear more frequently in parts of Canada and the U.S. “The Earth’s magnetic field more or less keeps the solar wind at bay, and...

Pictured is the piece of debris that washed up southwest of Great Britain. (Maritime and Coastguard Agency) A piece of debris from a SpaceX spaceship has washed ashore in the Isles of Scilly, southwest of Great Britain, and some amateur digital investigators believe they have solved the mystery. U.K. Coast Guard officials confirmed they found a piece of rocket debris that was , according to the CBC. When they got a closer look at the barnacle-covered object, they concluded it...

Scientists say they've located the crash site of the Apollo 16 booster on the Moon, 43 years after America's penultimate trip to the lunar surface. The discovery , a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, according to ABC News. He located the booster by studying high-resolution images from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, the report added. This image shows the crash site, as well as the crater left behind when the Apollo 16 booster collided with the...

An artist's rendering of how one exoplanet might look. (NASA/JPL-CALTECH) A team of researchers have found that at least half of the known exoplanets– planets outside our solar system– may not actually be planets at all. Scientists told the Extreme Solar Systems III conference that are false positives, Science Magazine reported. These celestial bodies, previously believed to be planets, may actually be groupings of failed stars, known as brown dwarfs, orbiting one another, the scientists also said. The discovery was...

The photo above is one of the highest-resolution images of Pluto from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft. It shows new details of the planet's rugged, icy cratered plains. New high-resolution images from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft provide the clearest look at Pluto that we might have for decades. Space.com reports that the spectacular photos were during its historic Pluto flyby on July 14. They provide a close up look at the dwarf planet's sweeping plains and massive water-ice mountains. Previously unnoticed...

There's reason to brave the elements this December: The month's meteor shower, the Geminids, is the best and brightest of the year, Dr. Bill Cooke, an expert in NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office, told weather.com. Meteors will start to streak across the sky the night of Dec. 4, continuing through the 17th. The show will peak in the early morning hours of Dec. 14 — between midnight and 3 a.m. is the sweet spot, Cooke said. “If you can stand the...

NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory captured this close-up image of an outburst on the sun's surface, between Nov. 3-5, 2015. Though the sun’s extreme ultraviolet light is invisible to our eyes, the wavelength is colorized here in red. (NASA/SDO) 2015 was a banner year for space exploration. Some of the stunning discoveries and most-memorable celestial images are rounded up in the slideshow above; it's a look back at a year spent among the cosmos. In March, NASA launched its Magnetospheric MultiScale...

Pictured is a screenshot of NASA's visualizations of the space environment simulation. (NASA / Goddard Space Flight Center) In a new video released by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio, simulations show experienced between January and August on its way to Pluto. The list of space weather factors New Horizons endured included a string of solar winds and some curious particle clouds that were showing some odd behavior. The clouds, known as coronal mass ejections, can be seen...

Left: A normal star in a binary system gravitationally pulls in matter from an aging companion star that has swelled to a bloated red giant that has expanded to a few hundred times its original size. Right: After a couple hundred million years, the red giant star has burned out and collapsed to the white dwarf that shines intensely in ultraviolet wavelengths. The companion star has bulked up on the hydrogen siphoned off of the red giant star to become...

Saturn's largest moon Titan glows greenish in this new composite image from NASA. (NASA) In a new infrared composite image, Saturn's largest moon glows green and blue, almost like an alter-ego of our own planet Earth. Dubbed "" by the Daily Mail, Titan's coloration in this image captured by NASA's Cassini spacecraft is due to an infrared mapping spectrometer that penetrated through the hazy atmosphere to show a detailed glimpse of Titan's surface. The image was taken during the T-114...

Water, salt or an alien city? Scientists have been wondering about the strange bright spots on dwarf planet Ceres since NASA's in March, and now a new study in the journal Nature has put the spotlight on these light spots. According to NASA,dot the dwarf planet. The glowing spots are found in Ceres' 60-mile-wide Occator crater, and new false-color images have enabled researchers to identify the nature of these blotches: They are consistent with a type of magnesium sulfate called...

It looks like Jupiter, but it's not! An illustration of the newly discovered star, W1906+40, shows a raging storm near one of its poles. (NASA/JPL-Caltech) We know that clouds can form on Earth and other planets – but scientists have just found the best evidence that clouds, and storms, can form on stars. Using NASA's Spitzer and Kepler telescopes, astronomers have found a star that's eerily similar to Jupiter. For a star, it's cooler in temperature and much smaller than...