News

Friday, August 23 Observers of the outer solar system can now get a good view of Uranus during the late evening hours. The ice giant planet rises shortly after 10 p.m. local daylight time and climbs 20° high in the east by midnight. It reaches it...

Earth is the only place in the universe where we know life exists. But with billions of other star systems out there, it might not be the best place for life. In a new study, astronomers modeled the potential for life on other watery planets and foun...

The solar system is a crowded place. Earth may be the only planet with humans on it, but many worlds are home to robots — rovers and landers and orbiters, gathering data for astronomers. Asteroid (162173) Ryugu joined them last summer, and has ...

Commercial crew vehicles now have a second parking spot at the International Space Station (ISS). Two NASA astronauts successfully installed a new docking adapter Wednesday for incoming SpaceX and Boeing vehicles that may arrive with crew as early as...

It’s sometimes called the “Transylvania effect.” In the dark sky, the clouds shift, revealing the Full Moon’s eerie silver gleam, and the people on Earth below go mad. It’s a story that gets repeated by doctors, teachers...

Fast radio bursts are one of the most puzzling phenomena in astrophysics. But a new discovery of eight new sources for them might help scientists figure out what’s causing these intense outbursts of energy coming from distant galaxies. The new...

There is a triplet of Earth-sized planet candidates orbiting a star just 12 light-years away, a new study has found. And one appears to be in the habitable zone. All three candidates are thought to be at least 1.4 to 1.8 times the mass of Earth, and ...

Many dream of what they would do had they a time machine. Some would travel 100 million years back in time, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth. Not many, though, would think of taking a telescope with them, and if, having done so, observe Saturn and its...

The Beta Pictoris system swirls with activity — a dusty disk of debris, comets falling toward the central star, and at least one giant planet. And now, astronomers have uncovered evidence for yet another planetary Goliath, some nine times the m...

I was 14 years old when I first saw Saturn through a telescope, its rings glowing a vibrant yellow-orange. In that moment, the seemingly two-dimensional landscape of Earth’s surface was irreversibly transformed. From then on, I was hooked on th...

Rocky planets just a little larger than Earth are some of the best targets for finding life in our local cosmic neighborhood. They’re abundant. But it’s not just the size that has to match Earth. Our planet wouldn’t be the life-shel...

The force seems to be strong in this galaxy far, far away. NGC 5866 sits 44 million lightyears from Earth, and, from our vantage point, looks uncannily like a Star Wars-worthy lightsaber. NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope recently captured the pic...

Friday, August 16 Asteroid 15 Eunomia reached opposition and peak visibility just four days ago, and the view tonight is essentially the same. The main-belt object traverses the sky from dusk to dawn and climbs halfway to the zenith in the southern...

In November of 2016, the sharp-eyed Gaia spacecraft spied a supernova that exploded some billion light-years from Earth. Astronomers followed up with more telescopes, and quickly realized that this supernova – dubbed SN2016iet – was an od...

In 2016, NASA’s Juno spacecraft arrived at Jupiter with the goal of peering through Jupiter’s dense clouds to reveal the giant planet’s inner secrets. Along with the stunning pictures Juno has sent back, it’s also used its ins...

The ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft recently revealed the bleak yet beautiful terrain of Terra Cimmeria in Mars southern highlands. The stunning new views highlight valleys carved by liquid water that once flowed across the surface, windswept dun...

ExoMars is a planned mission to Mars set to launch in the summer of 2020. But a recent series of parachute test failures may threaten that launch date. ExoMars is being built by a joint operation between the European and Russian space agencies (ESA a...

The solar system once experienced a meteor shower of epic proportions: Asteroids whizzed around the inner planets, crashing down in a rain of fire that left their surfaces scarred for billions of years. Astronomers typically call this period the Late...

Antarctica is one of the most pristine places on the planet. Thanks to its generally inhospitable nature, as well as its natural isolation, it’s a good place for astronomers to search for meteorites and other materials that fall from the sky. T...

A bright Moon seriously hinders the Perseid meteor shower this year. The shower’s peak occurs the morning of August 13, just two days before Full Moon. On the 13th, the Moon sets around 4 a.m. local daylight time, and the first hints of twiligh...

(Inside Science) -- Experts believe the building blocks of life first bumped into each other about 3.5 billion years ago. This serendipitous collision somehow helped form the first rudimentary cell -- and the first life on Earth. At least, that's bee...

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope caught two galaxies merging in a dance-like fashion. The pair, dubbed UGC 2369, have been pulled together by gravity for quite some time now. And this pull creates the woven fabric of the blues and browns seen in t...

When a massive star dies, it leaves behind a dense core called a neutron star. Many of these exotic suns spin rapidly, sending out beams of radiation like lighthouses, and these are called pulsars. They can rotate thousands of times a second, and spi...