Two comets collided at low speed in the early Solar System to give rise to the distinctive ‘rubber duck’ shape of Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, say Rosetta scientists.

Space science image of the week: A simulation of gravitational radiation rippling away from a pair of colliding black holes

Researchers detected signatures of hydrated minerals on slopes where mysterious streaks are seen on the Red Planet.

Thought to be at least 9 billion years old, it contains an active galactic nucleus, an incredibly bright object resulting from the accretion of gas by a central supermassive black hole.

Have you been exploring the International Space Station in our panoramic tour? Tell us what you think and how it could be improved

NASA’s Opportunity Mars rover will soon move to a position that will help the sun-powered robot keep active through the Martian winter.

Read about ESA astronaut Tim Peake’s Principia mission

Our week through the lens: 21-25 September 2015

A spacecraft tool is now improving car safety by stress-testing many of the internal computer systems to be sure they work well when the car is on the road.

Rover operators plan to use the vehicle through the upcoming martian winter and beyond to study outcrops bearing clay minerals.

The fact that gravitational waves weren’t detected goes against theoretical expectations and throws our current understanding of black holes into question.

Europe’s latest pair of Galileo satellites has passed its initial check out in space, allowing control to be handed over to the main control centre and join the growing fleet.

NASA will detail a major science finding from the agency’s ongoing exploration of Mars during a news briefing at 8:30 a.m. PDT (11:30 a.m. EDT) on Monday, Sept. 28.

Today, ESA celebrates the 40th anniversary of the Agency’s ground station network, the indispensable link to spacecraft that are helping us to learn about our planet, our Solar System and our Universe.

It’s a unique and perplexing landscape stretching over hundreds of miles.

Underground water vapor reaches the comet’s cold surface and freezes again, blanketing that patch of surface with a thin layer of fresh ice.

The winning entry in the #Estrack40 audio contest is now the official theme music for ESA’s ground station network

ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft has provided evidence for a daily water-ice cycle on and near the surface of comets.

There is more oxygen in Earth’s core than originally thought.

Scientists are trying to learn whether this is normal behavior that was unnoticed due to limited monitoring or these flares are triggered by the recent close passage of a mysterious dusty object.

A new study strengthens the case for the existence of a third major class of black holes.

Potentially prime sources of gravitational waves, supermassive black hole pairs may not be as common as astronomers predict.

DESI will measure the redshifts of more than 30 million galaxies and quasars with unprecedented precision. And, if approved, the instrument will give new life to Kitt Peak National Observatory’s iconic Mayall telescope.

A problem recently discovered in two sensors in the propulsion system of the entry, descent and landing demonstrator module has prompted the recommendation to move the launch of the ExoMars 2016 mission, initially foreseen in January, to M…

NGC 3921 is an interacting pair of disk galaxies in the late stages of its merger.

ESA deploys ‘big iron’ to communicate with its deep-space missions: three 35 m-diameter dishes employing some of the world’s most advanced tracking technology. And it’s about to get a boost.

ESA’s three Deep Space Antenna stations at New Norcia, Australia, Cebreros, Spain and Malargüe, Argentina, beam commands and receive data from spacecraft voyaging hundreds of millions of kilometres into our Solar System.

The researchers found that one of the black holes is gobbling up more matter than the other, and this process heats up matter that emits energetic light.

Pluto’s flowing ice is downright Earth-like in these freshly downloaded images from New Horizons. But instead of water, the dwarf planet’s hydrological cycle appears driven by soft and exotic ices like nitrogen.

A dance between two candidate black holes is yielding some high-speed secrets.

Astronomers found large disks of dust around two of the stars, telltale signs of planets in the process of forming.

Recently, astronomers have combined all the data available for the nearby Sculptor Dwarf Galaxy to create the most accurate star formation history ever determined for a dwarf spheroidal galaxy.

A global ocean lies beneath the icy crust of Saturn’s geologically active moon Enceladus, according to new research using data from NASA’s Cassini mission.

Just as the Moon came into SDO’s field of view on a path to cross the Sun, Earth entered the picture, blocking SDO’s view completely.

Researchers found that the magnitude of the moon’s slight wobble, as it orbits Saturn, can only be accounted for if its outer ice shell is not frozen solid to its interior.

Further impacts to these regions may have then sealed up cracks and decreased porosity.

This sandstone outcrop has a structure called crossbedding on a large scale that the team has interpreted as deposits of sand dunes formed by wind.

ESA astronaut Andreas Mogensen, Soyuz spacecraft commander Gennady Padalka and Kazakh cosmonaut Aidyn Aimbetov landed this morning at 00:51 GMT (02:51 CEST 12 September) in the steppe of Kazakhstan, marking the end of their missions to the…

The next rock target to be drilled by NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover may be sandstone that was deposited by wind, unlike previous rock targets deposited by water.

Wildfires driven by autumn Santa Ana winds are 10 times more expensive than summer fires, a new study shows. But both kinds are costly, and both are on the increase.

ESA astronaut Andreas Mogensen is proving to be an expert space driver after commanding two rovers from space this week. As part of ESA’s Meteron project, Andreas drove a second, car-sized rover from the International Space Station to repair a mockup lunar base in the Netherlands.

The unexpected find suggests that behemoth galaxies at the cores of massive clusters can grow significantly by feeding off gas stolen from other galaxies.

A student has found a rare close binary composed of two massive stars with magnetic fields.

Europe’s own satellite navigation system has come a step nearer to completion today, with Galileo 9 and 10 which lifted off together at 02:08 GMT on 11 September (04:08 CEST; 23:08 local time, 10 September) from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana, atop a Soyuz launcher.

They reveal new features as diverse as possible dunes, nitrogen ice flows that apparently oozed out of mountainous regions onto plains, and even networks of valleys that may have been carved by material flowing over Pluto’s surface.

Astronomers have discovered a rare beast of a galaxy cluster whose heart is bursting with new stars.

An unusual observation by Mars Express shows a sweeping view over the planet’s south polar ice cap and across its ancient, cratered highlands.

New measurements show that Mercury is spinning on its axis about nine seconds faster than scientists had previously calculated.

A new statistical method enabled scientists to parse out signals from the noise in Hubble’s deep-sky images, providing the first estimate of the number of small galaxies in the early universe.

The brightest spots on the dwarf planet Ceres gleam with mystery in new views delivered by NASA’s Dawn spacecraft.

The new up-close view of Occator Crater from Dawn’s current vantage point reveals better-defined shapes of the brightest central spot and features on the crater floor.

The answer lies in densely packed and previously unrecognized nuggets of star-forming material sprinkled through the galaxy.

Europe’s ninth and tenth Galileo satellites have reached their launch pad, taking their position atop the vertical Soyuz launcher in readiness for Friday’s launch.

The mission team has begun the yearlong intensive downlinking of the tens of gigabits of data the spacecraft collected and stored on its digital recorders from the Pluto flyby.

Follow ESA astronaut Andreas Mogensen operating the Interact rover from space – rover testing now starts at 1410 GMT (1610 CEST)

Space Science Image of the Week: Planck reveals an interstellar filament and our galactic neighbours, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds

The Sentinel-2A satellite has been in orbit for only a matter of weeks, but new images of an algal bloom in the Baltic Sea show that it is already exceeding expectations. Built essentially as a land monitoring mission, Sentinel-2 will also…

Our week through the lens: 31 August-4 September 2015

When the next pair of Galileo satellites is boosted into orbit next Friday, a team of mission control experts in Darmstadt, Germany, will spring into action, working around the clock to bring the duo through their critical first days in sp…

Watch the replay of ESA astronaut Andreas Mogensen, commander Sergei Volkov and Aidyn Aimbetov opening the hatch to the International Space Station after a two-day flight in space

To researchers surprise, nature apparently forms stars with a consistent distribution from massive supergiants to tiny dwarfs.

After a two-day flight in space, ESA astronaut Andreas Mogensen, commander Sergei Volkov and Aidyn Aimbetov arrived at the International Space Station at 07:39 GMT (09:39 CEST)

Earth observation image of the week: a Sentinel-2 image of the Northern Territory desert in Australia, also featured on the Earth from Space video programme