Astronomy

Astronomers Make Massive Discovery on the Far Side of the Moon

The heavy core of a giant asteroid may be buried beneath the moon's South Pole-Aitken basin

All you'll need to see Jupiter is a pair of binoculars

Tonight Is the Best Time of the Year to See Jupiter and Its Many Moons

Jupiter will reach opposition the night of June 10, forming a straight line with Earth and the sun

Artist's rendering of the planets orbiting PDS 70.

Astronomers Snap a Rare Picture of Two Baby Planets

The Very Large Telescope imaged Planets PDS 70b and PDS 70c about 370 light years away creating a gap in the gas and dust disk around their star

The Oldest Film of a Solar Eclipse Has Been Restored and Released Online

In 1900, magician, astronomer and filmmaker Nevil Maskelyne used a special adapter to film the astronomical event in North Carolina

The sixty Starlink satellites before being deployed.

Astronomers Worry New SpaceX Satellite Constellation Could Impact Research

The first of SpaceX's 12,000 Starlink broadband satellites launched last week, raising fears they could interfere with ground-based telescopes

A volcano can provide a great deal of geothermal energy

Could Yellowstone's Volcanoes Provide Geothermal Power and More Questions From Our Readers

You asked, we answered

One-Third of Exoplanets Could Be Water Worlds With Oceans Hundreds of Miles Deep

A new statistical analysis suggests seas hundreds of miles deep cover up to 35 percent of distant worlds

Image of planetary nebula NGC 7027 with illustration of helium hydride molecules. In this planetary nebula, SOFIA detected helium hydride, a combination of helium (red) and hydrogen (blue), which was the first type of molecule to ever form in the early universe. This is the first time helium hydride has been found in the modern universe.

NASA’s Flying Telescope Spots Oldest Type of Molecule in the Universe

An infrared telescope mounted in a Boeing 747 has detected the first type of molecule to form after the big bang

Harvard astronomers theorize that a meteor that struck Earth's atmosphere in 2014 could have been from another solar system, judging by what scientists know about 'Oumuamua, an interstellar object that zipped through our solar system in 2017. (An artist's depiction of 'Oumuamua is seen here.)

An Interstellar Meteor May Have Collided With Earth in 2014

Researchers have identified an object that, they theorize, was traveling too fast to have originated within our solar system

Scientists Find a Tiny Speck of Comet Inside a Meteorite

The little fragment found in Antarctica was protected from the elements and preserves the chemical signature of the early solar system

A photographic plate of the 1919 total solar eclipse, taken by Andrew Claude de la Cherois Crommelin and Charles Rundle Davidson during an expedition to Sobral, Brazil. The 1919 eclipse was used by Arthur Eddington, who observed it from the island of Principe off the west coast of Africa, to provide the first experimental evidence of Einstein's theory of relativity.

What the Obsolete Art of Mapping the Skies on Glass Plates Can Still Teach Us

The first pictures of the sky were taken on glass photographic plates, and these treasured artifacts can still help scientists make discoveries today

2007 OR10 is the largest object in our solar system with out a name.

The Largest Unnamed Object in the Solar System Needs a Title—and You Can Help

2007 OR10 needs a snazzier moniker; the public can now choose between ‘Gonggong,’ ‘Holle’ and ‘Vili’

The image reveals the black hole at the center of Messier 87, a massive galaxy in the nearby Virgo galaxy cluster. This black hole resides 55 million light-years from Earth and has a mass 6.5 billion times that of the sun.

Astronomers Capture First-Ever Image of a Supermassive Black Hole

The Event Horizon Telescope reveals the silhouette of a black hole at the center of a galaxy 55 million light-years away

Margaret Dayhoff was a pioneer of using computers to tackle some of the biggest scientific questions of the day.

How Margaret Dayhoff Brought Modern Computing to Biology

The pioneer of bioinformatics modeled Earth’s primordial atmosphere with Carl Sagan and made a vast protein database still used today

Exoplanet Core Orbiting a Dying Star May Help Astronomers Understand What Lies in Store for Our Solar System

It's likely the planetesimal orbiting a white dwarf 410 light years away was the core of a minor planet caught in its immense gravity

The most recent vortex on the left and the first one discovered in 1989 by Voyager 2.

There's a Dark and Stormy Vortex Brewing on Neptune

It is the sixth massive dark and stormy vortex found on the planet since 1989 and the only one astronomers have watched develop

The positions of the globular clusters used to estimate the mass of the Milky Way.

How Much Does the Milky Way Weigh?

Measurements from the Gaia satellite and Hubble Space Telescope show our galaxy tips the scales at about 1.5 trillion solar masses

Using Landmine Detectors, Meteorite Hunt Turns Up 36 Space Rocks in Antarctica

The scientists had a hunch that more meteorites were hidden a foot below the ice—they were right

That's so metal.

Planetary Smash-Up May Have Produced This Distant Iron Exoplanet

Computer simulations suggest Kepler 107c could have been formed when two rocky planets collided, stripping it down to its metal core

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Astrophysicist Mercedes Lopez-Morales Is Grooming the Next Generation of Planet Hunters

"The Daily Show" correspondent Roy Wood, Jr. talks with the astrophysicist about adrenaline, fear, curiosity and attracting younger generations to science

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