Staff at the Canada Aviation and Space Museum helped launch StarBlox Inc., a new game for Nintendo Switch. Read more about the museum’s approach to making the game — and hear an audio clip from CBC’s All in a Day .

There are almost one million asteroids and comets in our solar system. And every single one of them (we think) formed here, within our solar system, alongside the planets just over 4.5 billion years ago. However, in the summer months of 2017, an object not borne from the Solar System made a silent entrance, whipped around the Sun in September 2017, and started heading out again, never to return. This object, now named ‘Oumuamua, was the first asteroid discovered from outside the solar system.

The first exosolar planet (a planet orbiting a star other than the Sun) was discovered in 1995, and since then humans have found over 3600 planets outside of our solar system. Some of those found are orbiting not one star like we do, but two stars. For example, stars Kepler-35A and 35B orbit each other, but a planet Kepler-35b, orbits both of them. This is much more like the fantasy word Tatooine in the space epic Star Wars than our own planet Earth. In A New Hope, we see young Luke Skywalker

A new company called Earth-i has announced it will be launching a constellation of satellites into Earth's orbit that will download "fast-turn-around pictures and colour video of the planet's surface."

The Total Solar Eclipse of 2017 that crossed the United States garnered international attention. Here in Canada we were treated to a beautiful partial solar eclipse, and the Canada Aviation and Space Museum attracted thousands of visitors to watch. Here NASA has published some of the ways the eclipse was watched, from the ground and from space. My favourite is the above picture because it has the Sun, which is 150 million kilometres away, the Moon, which is 400,000 kilometres away, and the

A full re-examination of the Kepler Space Telescope's data has revealed an additional 10 new planets that are near-Earth size and in their host-star's habitable zone. Even more interesting, follow-up studies on all of the rocky planets discovered by Kepler (thousands) to-date show that smaller planets come in two sizes. They are either 1.5 Earth Radii and smaller, or 2 Earth Radii and larger. The Kepler Space Telescope held its primary data collection from 2009 to 2013. The total number of

When you read a scientific story in a popular blog or magazine, many times you will see the caveat "artist interpretation" next to some of the accompanying images. This as a gross undersell of the time, effort, and most important, accuracy, that goes into developing the renders. While we don't know what a black hole or an exoplanet looks like, it is important to attempt to visualize them, and to do it as accurately as possible. This video is an interview with two people who are responsible for

The Boomerang Nebula is the coldest location in the known universe: it measures at roughly 2 degrees colder than empty space! This nebula is the result of the death of a red giant star, and the extreme temperature is caused by the rapid expansion of the nebula. According to thermodynamics, if you expand a gas you, cool a gas (just try using one of those compressed air cans for cleaning electronics). However, according to astronomers, a single star's death could not account for a strong enough

On 5 June 2017, India performed a full launch test of their GSLV-MK3, putting a test-satellite into geosynchronous transfer orbit. This is a huge step forward for the India Space Research Organisation (ISRO), which could eventually use this rocket for human space travel. For the details on the rocket itself, as well as a rundown of ISRO's history check out this article from the Planetary Society.

The Cassini spacecraft has only 11 more orbits left of the ringed planet Saturn before its destruction. On September 15th, 2017, Cassini will make a planned plunge into the clouds of Saturn, which will cause it to break up. The science is packed in for Cassini over these orbits: it will study the rings by imaging and sampling, create a more accurate gravitational map of Saturn, and measure the magnetic field of Saturn. Here take a look at the summary of science in the final phase of the Grand