Field: Astronomy

Using the James Webb Space Telescope, researchers are gaining new insights into Enceladus, which holds a sea beneath its icy surface.

Terraforming Mars has been a dream for decades; here’s how we might get it started today.

Recasting the iconic Carrington Event as just one of many superstorms in Earth’s past, scientists reveal the potential for even more massive eruptions.

NASA hopes a massive radio telescope on the moon will be able to reveal what was happening during the mysterious “Cosmic Dark Ages."

Patience and persistence pays off in ways researchers never expected, allowing them to hear the dying whispers of a distant star.

An Earth-sized exoplanet 90 light years away may be covered in active volcanoes — and home to extraterrestrial life.

A startup’s audacious plan to revive NASA’s retired Spitzer Space Telescope just secured a $250,000 Space Force contract.

NASA has released a video of its one-of-a-kind snake robot EELS slithering across a variety of challenging terrains.

The UAE’s high-resolution images of Mars’ moon Deimos suggest that the tiny satellite isn’t what we thought it was.

While NASA prepares to launch its lunar space station, other groups are working to ensure we still have an off-world home closer to Earth.

There are many techniques to search for planets orbiting other stars. Perhaps the simplest of these is called direct imaging, but it's not easy.

The Nancy Roman Telescope is already being built with a goal no smaller than to find inhabited planets beyond Earth.

Three of Jupiter’s moons – Europa, Ganymede and Callisto – are home to large, underground oceans of liquid water that could support life.

A new technique for making super-thin, lightweight space telescope mirrors could dramatically improve our view of space.

Caltech researchers have created an interactive map of Mars that lets anyone explore the surface of the Red Planet in unprecedented detail.

Now that falling launch costs are making space more accessible, hundreds of groups are looking for ways to make money off-world.

Here in our Solar System, of all the known planets, only Earth — not Mercury, not Venus, and not Mars — possesses plate tectonics.

For many decades, people conflated the hot Big Bang, describing the early Universe, with a singularity: that this "Big Bang" was the birth of space and time.

Two years after proposing his general theory of relativity, Einstein endeavored to find the shape of the Universe.

A “treasure map” highlighting places where meteorites are most likely to be found has led to the discovery of a 17-pound space rock.

Old images from NASA’s Magellan mission may have revealed that Venus, a close analogue to Earth, has volcanic activity.

While most of humanity's terraforming dreams have focused on Mars, a better candidate may be even closer: the Moon.

An AI trained to hunt for technosignatures from intelligent alien life found 8 interesting signals on its first deployment.

NASA has added a tenth asteroid flyby to the record-breaking Lucy mission so that it can test a new asteroid-tracking system.

By analyzing just three dust particles, researchers learned that the rubble pile asteroid Itokawa is 4.2 billion years old and hard to kill.

A 650-million-years-old meteorite found in Africa shows the rich and complex chemistry that once happened on Mars.

Jupiter's moon Io is thought to be inhospitable, but new data suggests life could exist underground, perhaps in lava tubes.

NASA has announced that it is developing the Habitable Worlds Observatory, a new space telescope optimized to hunt for extraterrestrial life.

SpaceX has signed an agreement with the National Science Foundation detailing its plans to minimize Starlink’s impact on astronomy.

Though it makes up about 26% of the Universe, we cannot see dark matter. But we know it's there because we can see its effects.

Can an astrophysicist get ChatGPT to learn and assimilate new information and give correct answers where it gave confident but false ones?

After decades of wondering how ring galaxies form, we've caught them in enough stages of evolution that we finally know where they come from.

University of Rochester researchers think they have a solution to creating an asteroid city: a giant bag.

2023 will see the launch of new rockets, the return of OSIRIS-REx, and a mission to Jupiter that could help us find extraterrestrial life.

Twin exoplanets 218 light years from Earth may be the first known examples of “water worlds.”

For a long time, only two habitable zone planets of any size were known to astronomers: Earth and Mars. But NASA's discovered another.

A massive, 4.5-billion-year-old meteorite located in Somalia contains two new minerals never seen before in nature.

If the black holes that form in our cosmos give birth to baby Universes, perhaps we arose from the formation of a black hole ourselves.

3.4 billion years ago, an asteroid impact created a megatsunami on Mars that extended for 1500 kilometers. Here's the fascinating story.

In a remarkable achievement, three new large asteroids have been found in the most elusive place: inside the orbit of Earth.

Thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope, we now know more about the atmosphere of WASP-39b, a distant gas giant, than any other exoplanet.

The "upper limit" to the size of our planets is exceeded in other stellar systems, but double Jupiter's radius seems to be the limit.

NASA’s Lunar Flashlight mission will use reflections from laser light to measure lunar water hidden in permanently shadowed craters.

A meteorite impact that caused a marsquake and created a massive new Mars crater could shape our plans to send people to the Red Planet.

Scientists carried out an ultra-precise test of a core premise of Einstein’s modern theory of gravity. The theory stood up.

Interstellar distances are vast, and extremely advanced technology will be required if we (or aliens) want to visit other star systems.

In 2024, the LSST Camera will begin a 10-year-long survey of space that could revolutionize astronomy — if LEOsats don’t get in the way.

NASA and SpaceX may use a Dragon spacecraft to boost the Hubble Space Telescope into a higher, life-saving orbit.

DART collision images captured by NASA's Hubble and James Webb space telescopes show what happens when a spacecraft slams into an asteroid.

Scientists trained a neural network to predict the movements of Mars and the Sun, which placed the Sun at the center of our solar system.

SpaceX’s massive Starship rocket is “highly likely” to complete its first orbital test flight in November 2022, according to CEO Elon Musk.

A new moon mineral discovered by China contains helium-3, an element that could one day fuel nuclear fusion reactors on Earth.

New simulations of continent distribution could help astronomers assess whether newly-discovered exoplanets may be habitable.

A wormhole is like a tunnel between two distant points in our universe that cuts the travel time from one point to the other.

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has directly observed an exoplanet for the first time — ushering in a new era of exoplanet research

There are between 6 and 20 trillion galaxies out there. Carl Sagan's "billions and billions" was far too low of a guess.

These Artemis 1 experiments could protect NASA astronauts and help usher in a future in which space is accessible to everyone.

Sailplanes could harvest wind energy from Mars’ atmosphere, probing unexplored regions for long stretches of time.

When we measure it, we find that our Universe really is flat. Here's what we can learn from that, and why it matters so much.

The first ocean planet may have just been discovered in the “Goldilocks zone” of a star 100 light-years from Earth.

Today, the fastest-ever nova to fall off has been discovered, and even faster ones may be out there. What comes next?

NASA scientists have “remixed” the incredibly deep sounds emitted by a black hole 240 million light-years away.

A study of “underwater snow” on Earth is informing NASA’s hunt for habitable locations on Jupiter’s icy moon Europa.

Satellite mega constellations could bring the world online, but they're also a threat to astronomy. Can we study space and build in it, too?

With its first deep-field image, the James Webb Space Telescope has truly ushered in an entirely new era in astronomy and astrophysics.

An analysis of the gravitational wave data from black hole mergers show that the event horizon area, and entropy, always increases.

The James Webb Space Telescope's first set of science images showcases the breadth of the observatory’s capabilities.

On July 11, 2022, the very first science image of the James Webb Space Telescope was unveiled to the world.

NASA has announced the first targets for the James Webb Space Telescope and plans to share the full-color images on July 12.

Asteroid strikes, supernova explosions, and gamma-ray bursts are just a few of the ways the cosmos can kill us.

Researchers observed an ultra-rare particle interaction that reveals the half-life of a xenon-124 atom to be 18 sextillion years.

China’s Earth 2.0 mission will survey the Milky Way in the hope of identifying exoplanets similar to Earth.

The asteroid that caused the last mass extinction 65 million years ago was only 5 kilometers across — tiny compared to this one.

There are many different "ends" in store for our planet, in both the near and far future. Here are the ways our planet will meet its demise.

Ukrainian startup Promin Aerospace is developing a “self-devouring” rocket built from a material that its engine can burn as fuel.

Nuclear thermal propulsion systems could power missions to Mars, help defense satellites evade attacks, and more.

To help protect Earth from potentially hazardous asteroids, astronomers developed an algorithm to look for them in existing datasets.

Saturn's Iapetus, discovered way back in 1671, has three bizarre features that science still can't fully explain.

The first non-American to reach the lunar surface will likely do so as part of NASA’s Artemis mission — and could be a Japanese astronaut.

Australian astronomers have discovered the brightest pulsar ever seen outside the Milky Way by putting “sunglasses” on a telescope.

NASA’s Perseverance rover has begun its Delta Front Campaign, the part of its mission most likely to produce evidence of past life on Mars.

Data from China’s Zhurong rover suggests there was substantial liquid water on Mars far more recently than we thought.

Stanford scientists have designed a gravity telescope concept that could take stunningly clear images of exoplanets.

The sheer amount of stuff already floating in space makes the domino effect of explosions a likely possibility.

The Event Horizon Telescope team has finally revealed what the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way looks like.

NASA recently tested a liquid lens technology that could make a space telescope so large it would dwarf all that have come before.

A new black widow pulsar has been discovered eating its companion star while a third star circles the binary system.

The astronomy community is divided on whether a meteor detected in 2014 is the first interstellar object spotted in our solar system.

A new study suggests we use the orbit of the Moon to find gravitational waves we can’t currently detect in other ways.

Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein is the largest comet ever observed, according to a new study based on Hubble Space Telescope data.

NASA's moon-bound SLS rocket is at Kennedy Space Center and ready for its wet dress rehearsal — the last major test before launch.

Astronomers have discovered a new farthest galaxy from Earth, and it could change what we thought we knew about the early universe.

Without driving anywhere, the rover was able to solve one of the big unknowns, which was that this crater once held water.

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has smashed its own record for farthest star ever seen with the detection of “Earendel.”

ESA’s Gaia observatory has snapped a photo of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, its new neighbor at Earth’s second Lagrange point.

The unconventional method could help astronomers better track meteorites that fall during the daytime.

A star image taken by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope suggests the first-of-its-kind spacecraft is going to work even better than expected.

NASA successfully pinpointed almost exactly where and when a new asteroid would hit Earth’s atmosphere, before it made contact.

Australian researchers have trained an AI to locate fallen space rocks using footage from autonomous drone surveys.