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Here are the top photos from Insight Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2017 competition and these images are truly spectacular. The competition, which is now in its 9th year, is directed by the  Royal Observatory in Greenwich , UK. This year's competition got almost 4,000 entries from both amateur and professional photographers. The photos range from beautiful snaps of the Northern Lights to amazing time-lapse photos of the Jellyfish Nebula. Below are some of our choices from the  shortlisted photographs .   Reflection by Beate Behnke (Germany), shows the Aurora Borealis being reflected off the water in Skagsanden. A Battle We Are Losing by Haitong Yu - Beijing, China, March 2, 2017 NGC 2023 by Warren Keller (USA) - Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, near La Serena, Chile, January 2, 2016 An Icy Moonscape © Kris Williams (UK), taken Snowdonia National Park, Conwy, UK, December 3, 2016 Eastern Prominence © Paul Andrew (UK) - taken in Dover, Kent, UK, August 29...

There is a massive black hole with millions of times more mass than our sun is plunging towards Earth and will one day annihilate life as we know it.  This particular black hole is coming towards us at 110 kilometres per second and is at the center of the Great Andromeda Galaxy – the Milky Way’s closest and much larger neighbor. At the center of the most known galaxies, there exist a supermassive black hole which stars spin around and helps keep everything in formation. But such is the powerful gravitational pull of the Milky Way and Andromeda that they are being drawn toward each other and will one day crash.  Fraser Cain, publisher of space website Universe Today, wrote for Phys.org :  “There’s a black hole at the centre of the Milky Way.  And not just any black hole, it’s a supermassive black hole with more than 4.1 million times the mass of the Sun.  It’s right over there, in the direction of the Sagittarius constellation. Located just 26,000 light-years aw...

One of the most entertaining names that I’ve come across in the physics sector is the “ Oh My God Particle .” Scientists also refer to this  particle as the “ermahgerd particle” (kidding, kidding. It’s not really called that, but it is called the “Oh My God Particle”).  Now, the first thing that may pop into some of your minds is the Higgs Boson, which was discovered in 2012. This isn’t too surprising as the media went around calling it the “God Particle.” However, these two particles are very different. So what is the Oh My God Particle? Well it is a simple, lowly proton. So why the name? This proton had the effective mass-energy of a baseball traveling at 90 km/h (56 mph)! This type of particle is known as a  cosmic ray , they’re generally just protons but can sometimes be a Helium atom or even an electron. What makes them so interesting is that they’re traveling very near the speed of light, and the Oh My God Particle is the fastest ever found.    D...

Just last year, alien search project Breakthrough Initiatives declared an aspiring plan to send tons of minute spacecraft to our nearby neighboring star system, Alpha Centauri. The mission, called Breakthrough Starshot, is concentrated on launching lightweight ‘nanocraft’ to the stars at rip-roaring speeds. Lately, the mission took a giant leap toward accomplishing its crucial goal by effectively sending six test craft into Low Earth Orbit. The small spacecraft, called “Sprites,” is just 3.5 centimeters on each side and weigh about only four grams. Aerospace engineer Zac Manchester, who is leading the design on the Sprites, has been working on them for the last 10 years. Manchester said: “What we’ve set out to do from the beginning is push the size limits of spacecraft. The question was how small can we make a satellite and still make it do something useful. One of the challenges is how can you get enough power, and given the tiny power you can harvest, how do you communicate back to E...

What exactly is consciousness and how it is generated? How and why it exists and what’s the ultimate cause of consciousness? These are some major question that scientists are looking for their answers. In today’s world the mystery of consciousness is a challenge for physicists, cognitive scientists, and neuroscientists.  There are few theories that try to explain the consciousness. One of the most accepted theory is materialism. This theory says that consciousness is generated by matter i.e. by the firing of neurons inside the brain. The second theory is mind-body duality. This is probably more often known as religion or spirituality. Here, consciousness is distinct from matter. It is a part of alternative characteristic of the individual, which in religious expression we might call the soul. Then there’s a third option which is gaining ground in some scientific society, Panpsychism . According to this theory, the entire universe is occupied by consciousness . Panpsychism is curr...

This Gif is the best and there is no better than this on internet. Not even your cats or dogs videos. You are wondering what is it exactly. Well it is next target for NASA’s New Horizons mission. A small rock in the outer skirts of our solar system, passed in front of a star as seen from Earth. The event in the early morning of July 17 lasted a split-second, but it will give us more information about this rock than we’ve ever gleaned before. All from the shadow that was cast over our planet. “It was the most historic occultation on the face of the Earth,” NASA’s director of planetary science, Jim Green, told the team in a statement. The Kuiper Belt Object (KBO) is called 2014 MU69. It measures roughly 22 to 40 kilometers (14 to 25 miles) across, but we don’t know for sure because it’s so far away and faint. It orbits 40 times further from the Sun than Earth. We also don’t really know what it looks like. It’s thought to be a leftover from the formation of our Solar System about 4.6 bill...

A group of researchers has discovered proof for a strange particle that, strangely, is also its own antiparticle. It was first proposed 80 years ago but now existence of it might be a reality. The results, published in the journal Science , were led by researchers from Stanford University in California and the University of California. The notion of a particle having its own antiparticle was first introduced in 1937 when Italian physicist Ettore Majorana (who strangely disappeared in 1938) first suggested the theory.  He said that inside the class of fermions, which comprise protons, electrons, and neutrons, some particles must have their own antiparticles, which became known as Majorana particles. An antiparticle is a particle that has the same mass as the normal particle, but a reverse electric or magnetic property. For instance, the electron’s antiparticle is the positron. If the two come across each other, they annihilate each other. In this study, the group of physicists st...

Astronomers at the University of Auckland claim that there are actually around 100 billion habitable, Earth-like planets in the Milky Way — significantly more than the previous estimate of around 17 billion.  There are roughly 500 billion galaxies in the universe, meaning there is somewhere in the region of 50,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (5×1022) habitable planets. I’ll leave you to do the math on whether one of those 50 sextillion planets has the right conditions for nurturing alien life or not. The previous figure of 17 billion Earth-like planets in the Milky Way came from the  Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in January, which analyzed data from the Kepler space observatory. Kepler essentially measures the dimming (apparent magnitude) of stars as planets transit in front of them — the more a star dims, the larger the planet. Through repeated observations we can work out the planet’s orbital period, from which we can usually derive the orbital distance and surface...

For Americans, NASA has been a household name since the '60s when it accomplished the apparently impossible, transporting and landing humans on the Moon. Since then, NASA has discovered other alien worlds like, Mars and Saturn's moon Titan, as well as flew past every planet in our solar system. It has accomplished so much on a very small budget. Just consider if we gave NASA hundreds of billions of dollars a year like what we spend on the US military. What more could NASA have accomplished over the years? The US already spends more on space exploration than any other nation in the world. NASA gets a big amount of this investment, the country's primary agency for space exploration. But this part of the budget that NASA gets is nothing compared to the overall US Federal budget. You will be surprised to know that after NASA landed the first man on the Moon back in 1969, its budget has dropped from 4.5% of the Federal budget to less than 0.5%. So let’s imagine if NASA’s budge...

Stephen Hawking has been quoted as saying that it is perfectly rational to assume intelligent life exists somewhere in the universe. Learn what would happen if we encounter aliens in the video below:

The longer we stay on Earth, the more apparent it becomes that maybe we should have a backup plan should we live long enough to completely dry ‘er up. On our quest to find the perfect place to call Second Home, we’ve come across these incredible exoplanets. Factoring in the Earth Similarity Index or ESI, we’ve compiled the Top 10 Earth-like planets discovered over the past decade. Learn more in the video below:

Space is an amazing and beautiful thing, from burning ice planets, to facts about the galaxies in our skies, in this video we take a look at 50 Amazing Space Facts.

What would happen to you if a black hole the size of a coin suddenly appeared in your pocket? Let’s find out in the video below!

Finally it’s here. The most awaited photoshoot of the year.  For the first time ever, researchers are able to see, in detail , the huge Great Red Spot first detected on Jupiter in the 1600s but constantly observed since 1830. The spacecraft sent back images of what’s really a massive storm raging on the planet’s surface. That data is starting to be received by NASA. The agency is boosting citizen-scientists like Jason Major to work on the raw images being beamed from the spacecraft. Here are some of those breathtaking images. Credit:NASA / JPL-Caltech / SwRI / MSSS / Roman Tkachenko Credit: NASA/Daniela Bustamante Credit: NASA / Phablo Araujo / Universidade Federal de Goiás Credit: NASA/Soumya Nanda Credit: NASA/SwRI/MSSS/Michael Galindo The more images are on the way and we will keep you updated. 

Scientists have detected powerful X-ray emissions from Pluto. A study led by the Chandra X-ray observatory exposed the emissions, baffling researchers about the dwarf planet, whose designation was demoted by the International Astronomical Union in 2006 after many Kuiper Belt Objects of same size were discovered. The new detection originate from researchers' current analysis of data from NASA’s New Horizons (NH) probe, which did an extraordinary flyby of Pluto in July 2015. Even though researchers have earlier found some solar bodies releasing X-rays, as an outcome of their interaction with solar winds, such discharges coming from Pluto, which is situated so far away from the Sun, are extremely unexpected. Pluto releasing X-rays has now upraised more questions about its atmosphere and its interaction with solar winds. Pluto was still undergoing summer when New Horizons made its flyby. The spacecraft identified Pluto's atmosphere was composed mostly of nitrogen gas (N²), methane ...

Here are some facts about Earth that you probably never knew. [video below]

Much like a black body in thermodynamics, a black hole is a region of space that pulls everything and prevents anything from escaping, even light. The reason it is called a "black" hole is because it sucks up all the light that hits its border and reflects nothing. Formed when an amply compact mass deforms space and time, a black hole has a defined surface known as the "event horizon" which marks the point of no return. Little is known about black holes but several scientists in history have developed their own theories about their properties and structures. Here is a list of 25 crazy facts about black holes.

Is our universe is the only one? From science fiction to science fact, there is a theory out there that proposes that there could be other universes along with our own. Learn more about this interesting theory in the video below:

Just last year, a Long March 2D rocket lift off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in the Gobi Desert transporting a satellite called Micius , named after an ancient Chinese logician from 391 B.C. Micius is in a Sun-synchronous orbit so that it travels over the exact same point on Earth at the same time each day. Micius is very important for quantum experiments. It has a highly sensitive receiver that can detect the quantum states of single photons sent from the ground. It is very helpful in experimenting entanglement, cryptography, and teleportation. Few days ago Micius team publicized the results of its first experiments. They used Micius to successfully teleport the first object from the ground to orbit. Researchers were able to teleport a proton from Earth to the orbit. You can read about the whole experiment and how it was done here . This is the first time that any object has been teleported from Earth to orbit, and it also smashes the record for the longest distance for...