A Saturday night out, 260 miles above London

An instrument aboard the International Space Station has detected a binary star system made up of a fast-spinning pulsar and a compact white dwarf that orbit each other every 38 minutes, a record for an accreting millisecond X-ray pulsar.

British astronaut Tim Peake, along with Soyuz commander Yuri Malenchenko and outgoing space station skipper Tim Kopra, departed the International Space Station today aboard the Soyuz TMA-19M capsule and landed safely in Kazakhstan at 1016 BST (0916 GMT).

Tim Peake speaks to Astronomy Now’s Greg Smye-Rumsby about his historic mission to the International Space Station, scheduled for launch on 15 December 2015.