News

Friday, June 15 Dwarf planet 1 Ceres is the largest object in the asteroid belt, which lies between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. It currently resides within the Sickle asterism in western Leo, which appears 25° high in the west after twilight...

NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover has enjoyed major headlines lately with some new discoveries that bring us one step closer to the detection of ancient life on Mars. But while Curiosity is enjoying this well-earned moment in the spotlight, its fello...

LUXEMBOURG, SILICON VALLEY — Asteroid Day, the official United Nations’ day of global awareness and education about asteroids, has announced worldwide events for the week of 25-30 June. Co-founded by astrophysicist and famed musician Dr....

Over 3,700 exoplanets have been found lurking around our universe, and although each has its own unique set of characteristics, the vast majority have one thing in common: they orbit a single star. Researchers once believed that it would be near impo...

Astronomers Seppo Mattila and Miguel Pérez-Torres usually study the natural deaths of stars, but they weren’t going to pass up the chance to investigate a stellar murder. A new paper in Science describes how they nabbed photographic evi...

Summary: Two independent teams of astronomers have uncovered convincing evidence that three young planets are in orbit around an infant star known as HD 163296. Using a new planet-finding strategy, the astronomers identified three discrete disturbanc...

Despite residing in it, it’s hard for us to know exactly how big the Milky Way is. But new research has found that our galaxy is bigger than previously thought. Using a large survey of stars instead of just models (as previous researchers did),...

The search for habitable exoplanets spans far and wide, pushing the limits of what our modern telescopes are capable of. But rest assured that we aren’t ignoring what’s in our own backyard. Researchers have kept diligent eyes on Alpha Cen...

Friday, June 8 Venus dominates the western sky after sunset. The dazzling object shines at magnitude –4.0 among the background stars of eastern Gemini. The planet appears 16° high an hour after sunset, a fraction of a degree lower than it w...

In a much-hyped press conference held on Thursday, NASA announced its Curiosity rover had uncovered new evidence of methane — a potential sign of life — as well as signs of organic compounds buried in ancient mudstone. The space agency d...

Well, Einstein’s done it again! That is to say, the gravitational theories of Albert Einstein have once again been confirmed, and to a new degree of precision. The equations of general relativity predicted a certain quantity would be zero, and...

We often look at rocky exoplanets when searching for habitability beyond our solar system, but what about gas giants? Although their gaseous atmospheres and non-terrestrial surfaces aren’t ideal for housing life, their rocky moons could be. Rec...

After suffering more than a year with a broken drill, NASA’s 5-year-old Mars rover Curiosity is now collecting and analyzing samples once again. The drill sits at the end of Curiosity’s LeBron James-sized robotic arm and is vital for gra...

Over the course of a decade, the Apollo program (in addition to landing humans on the Moon six times!) produced an incredible array of technical breakthroughs and achievements. But many people do not know that in addition to the army of NASA employee...