This book is about scientific error and wishful thinking and tells the story of how the world's greatest scientists searched for a planet, named Vulcan, that never existed. 

This workbook provides a comprehensive introduction to the exploration of our Universe and the technological advances in Earth-based telescopes and the application of automatic space vehicles facilitating this. It also explores the age-old question of whether there can be life elsewhere in the Universe and whether...

This book takes us on an extraordinary journey through the 99% of the cosmos we can't see, shining a light on entirely new galaxies, cosmic prehistory, black holes and supernovas. In a scientific detective story thousands of years in the telling, the mysteries of the Universe are revealed as we have never seen them...

While twentieth-century space exploration belonged to state-funded giants like NASA, now the most ambitious schemes belong to private companies and individuals such as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. This book explores some of the biggest ideas emerging from the private space sector, assessing which stand a change of...

This book transports us back to Victorian England, into the very heart of the great nineteenth-century scientific controversy about the Sun's hidden influence over our planet. It explores Carrington's observations of a mysterious explosion on the surface of the Sun and how his brilliant insight - that the Sun's...

The history of the telescope is far from short. Its invention in 1608 marked a turning point in progress: not just of science, but of astronomy and philosophy. This book introduces us to the extraordinary characters and events that have shaped the four hundred years of the telescope's existence and the future of...

A selection of resources where you can find out more about British Astronaut Tim Peake and his mission to space. 

Two science writers answer 140 of the biggest questions in physics, distilling the essence of each subject into tweets of 140 characters. Questions cover everything from the most basic - Why is the sky dark at night? Why do stars twinkle? - to the most challenging - What are quasars? What happened before the Big...

Rockets are used to launch satellites, probes and even astronauts into space. A rocket launch is extremely impressive. Thousands of kilograms are burned in just a few minutes in order to provide the force that the rocket needs in order to overcome the gravity of the Earth. Rockets provide an exciting context to...

For more than five hundred years the West has been powered by the impulse to explore, to push into a wider world, and to seek newer ones. In this book, we come to see Voyager as the successor to the greatest exploration efforts of the West, as the author traces the links from Magellan, Cortes, and Columbus through...

This item is one of over 25,000 physical resources available from the Resources Collection. The Archive Collection covers over 50 years of curriculum development in the STEM subjects. The Contemporary Collection includes the latest publications from UK educational publishers.

This book demonstrates that between the results of the 1976 Viking I lander and the latest scientific discoveries - from Martian soil to microbe-ridden meteorites - there is a powerful case for life on the Red Planet and beyond. Taking weird organisms on Earth as a starting point, including ice-loving bugs and...

This resource, from the Royal Observatory Greenwich, looks at what information we can gather by viewing (but not visiting) different parts of the universe. 

The...

This resource, from the Royal Observatory Greenwich, has a video that introduces 'light' as the electromagnetic spectrum and how an electromagnetic wave is made. It discusses the wavelength, speed and frequency of electromagnetic waves and how we can detect them. How light interacts with matter and the concept of...

This resource, from the Royal Observatory Greenwich, introduces students to how our understanding of gravity has changed over time, and what this means for the gravitational field strength of different bodies in our galaxy.

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