Everyone loves the Devil comet Sign up here to get an email whenever First Dog cartoons are published Get all your needs met at the First Dog shop if what you need is First Dog merchandise and prints ..read more

While 12P/Pons-Brooks may not be as famous as Halley’s, its appearance close to Jupiter is causing great excitement for stargazers Get our morning and afternoon news emails, free app or daily news podcast The green, horned “Devil comet” is now visible in Australian skies, offering a once-in-lifetime chance to see a unique celestial body. The comet – real name 12P/Pons-Brooks – was nicknamed the Devil comet because eruptions from its nucleus can make it look like it has two horns. More recently, Star Wars fans have nicknamed it the Millennium Falcon ..read more

Bill Nelson told Capitol Hill lawmakers that China has been ‘very, very secretive’ about its space progress, warning ‘we are in a race’ The head of Nasa has warned of China bolstering its space capabilities by using civilian programs to mask military objectives, cautioning that Washington must remain vigilant. “China has made extraordinary strides especially in the last 10 years, but they are very, very secretive,” Nasa administrator Bill Nelson told lawmakers on Capitol Hill ..read more

Cylinder slab that tore through Naples home last month was debris released from International Space Station in 2021 A heavy chunk of metal that crashed through the roof of a Florida home is, in fact, space junk, Nasa has confirmed. The federal space agency said that a cylinder slab that tore through a house in Naples, Florida, last month was debris from a cargo pallet released from the international space station in 2021, according to a Nasa blogpost ..read more

Our ozone is pennies thick – and soon we’ll put at least an Eiffel Tower’s worth of metallic ash into the ionosphere every year A dead spacecraft the size of a truck ignites with plasma and pulverizes into dust and litter as it rips through the ionosphere and atmosphere. This is what happens to internet service satellites during re-entry. When the full mega-constellation of satellites is deployed in the 2030s, companies will do this every hour because satellite internet requires thousands of satellites to constantly be replaced. And it could compromise our atmosphere or even our magnetosphere ..read more

The wealth of emerging evidence suggest that physics may be on the brink of something big Modern physics deals with some truly mind-boggling extremes of scale. Cosmology reveals the Earth as a tiny dot amid an observable universe that is a staggering 93bn light years across. Meanwhile, today’s particle colliders are exploring a microcosmic world billions of times smaller than the smallest atom. These two extremes, the biggest and smallest distances probed by science, are separated by 47 orders of magnitude. That’s one with 47 zeros after it, a number so ludicrously huge that it isn’t worth try ..read more

Annual event promises between five and 20 meteors an hour with a few rare cases becoming much brighter ‘fireballs’ The Lyrids are a meteor shower that derive from the tail of the comet Thatcher. Discovered by AE Thatcher in 1861, the comet is on a 422-year orbit of the sun and will not be returning to the inner solar system until 2283. Every year between 15 and 29 April, the Earth encounters the dust particles that it has left behind, with the peak of activity usually occurring on the night of 22 April, leading into the 23rd. The chart shows the view looking north-east from London at 22.00 BST ..read more

Meeting at London’s Royal Society will scrutinise basic model first formulated in 1922 that universe is a vast, even expanse with no notable features If you zoomed out on the universe, well beyond the level of planets, stars or galaxies, you would eventually see a vast, evenly speckled expanse with no notable features. At least, that has been the conventional view. The principle that everything looks the same everywhere is a fundamental pillar of the standard model of cosmology, which aims to explain the big bang and how the universe has evolved in the 13.7bn years since ..read more

For most people seeing a total solar eclipse is a once in a lifetime experience. But for scientists it can be a fleeting chance to understand something deeper about their field of research. Madeleine Finlay meets solar scientist prof Huw Morgan, of Aberystwyth University, and Adam Hartstone-Rose, professor of biological sciences at NC State University, to find out what they hoped to learn from 8 April’s four minutes of darkness. Find out more about how animals behave during a solar eclipse ..read more

This live blog is now closed. You can read our latest stories on the total eclipse below: If you missed today’s total solar eclipse just wait … until 2044 Millions across US, Mexico and Canada witness rare total solar eclipse First contact is when the moon’s outer edge first appears to touch the sun, creating the beginnings of a partial eclipse and a crescent sun reducing in size until totality (second contact). In the moments before totality, look for (in order) shadow bands, Baily’s Beads and a diamond ring, three of the most memorable stages of a total eclipse. It gives us the opportunity ..read more