News

For millennia scientists and observers have learned from our Sun and other stars that move throughout the night sky. The life and death of stars teaches us about star formation, solar system formation and occasionally fills on those odds and ends que...

A team of scientists may have confirmed the first failed supernova — and in the process witnessed the birth of a black hole. Caltech astronomer Scott Adams and his colleagues Christopher Kochanek, Jill Gerke, and Krzystof Stanek of Ohio St...

At the International Astronautical Congress 2016, SpaceX founder Elon Musk outlined his ambitious plan for making humanity a multiplanet civilization. And as expected, his plan starts at Mars. "If we could warm Mars up, we'd have a thick atmosphere a...

Hubble hasn’t found aliens on Europa, but it may have found new evidence that plumes of salt water from the moon’s globe-spanning salty ocean can escape through cracks in its icy shell. Using its Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STI...

Have you ever wondered why we age and grow old? In the movie “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” Brad Pitt springs into being as an elderly man and ages in reverse. To the bafflement of scientists, the fundamental laws of physics ha...

Strange chemistry may explain a seemingly impossible cloud in Titan’s upper atmosphere. Scientists looking through Cassini’s 2010 data recently noticed something strange in an infrared snapshot of Titan’s stratosphere: a wide, thin,...

A combination of observation and modelling sheds new light on how Lyman-Alpha blobs form and why they shine so brightly. Lyman-Alpha blobs are among the rarest denizens of the distant universe. They’re giant clouds of hydrogen gas spanning hund...

ESA has released a series of vivid images taken by its Rosetta probe of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko to the public. Rosetta is will be ending its mission on September 30 with a controlled crash onto the comet. There it will join Philae, the probe&...

A team of researchers has discovered what causes the rings around two centaurs, minor planets that orbit the Sun between Jupiter and Neptune. The researchers used computer simulations to test what caused the rings, using factors such as tidal pull,...

Now we know why there’s a glacier deep in Pluto’s frozen heart. The 2.5 mile-deep, 650-mile wide slab of nitrogen ice covers the Sputnik Planum region of Pluto’s northern hemisphere. A new numerical model explains how the glacier, a...

The Navy is once again teaching celestial navigation as a back up in case GPS systems become unusable. Celestial navigation, sometimes referred to as astronavigation, is a way for a navigator to use celestial bodies and angular measurements to know ...

New analysis of data taken by the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Planck spacecraft of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) has revealed that the “epoch of reionization” occurred much later than previously thought. The universe was ...

A year ago today, a select group of scientists became the first people on the planet to learn that, after a century of theory and experiments, Albert Einstein was right all along. Researchers at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observator...

When an earthquake occurs, it represents the release of years, sometimes decades or centuries, of pent-up stress. Somewhere along the fault line, a section of rock can take the strain no longer and gives way, allowing a tectonic plate to jerk into mo...

When NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft sent back the first high-resolution images of Pluto and its moon Charon, scientists quickly realized the outer solar system was more active than they’d previously thought. The first images of Charon rev...