Field: Outer Space

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.

Making plants grow on the Moon could be instrumental in helping gardens to grow greener on Earth in the face of climate change.

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

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.

Using decades-old data, researchers at Washington University in St. Louis have created a comprehensive Venus volcano map.

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.

How does space travel impact human health? Researchers are filling in the gaps in the data with AI.

What do astronauts, AI, and mice have in common? According to research, quite a lot.

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.

We are living in a period of living and traveling in space. If we continue on this trajectory, we will develop new spiritual views.

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

Inspired by chemistry observed on the surface of Venus, researchers produced a synthetic material that could improve air quality.

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.

Muons only live for 2.2 microseconds before decaying. Thanks to Einstein's relativity, they make it to the surface of the earth. Here's how to prove it.

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.

On Nov. 29, 2022, the Shenzhou 15 mission launched from China’s Gobi Desert carrying three taikonauts – the Chinese word for astronauts.

Scientists have pushed the Milky Way's early history back more than 2 billion years: to less than 800 million years after the Big Bang.

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

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.

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.

A recent study tested how well the fungi species Cladosporium sphaerospermum blocked cosmic radiation aboard the International Space Station.

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

When Mars samples arrive, they may carry more than knowledge. To offset the chance of a Martian pandemic, NASA is learning to contain a Red Planet plague.

From here to the limits of what we can see, here's a breathtaking illustrated logarithmic view of the Universe.

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

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.

The mega drive might provide enough thrust for a spacecraft to travel near the speed of light using only electricity, says one physicist.

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.

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.

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

Our entire planet is a little under 13,000 kilometers in diameter, or about seven orders of magnitude greater than the size of a human.

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.

A raft of “space bubbles” could be used to reverse global warming, according to an MIT group's solar geoengineering proposal.

What's holding us back from mining in space when we have such big plans already? The sheer cost, for one thing.

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

The researchers' findings will help scientists trace a black hole’s evolution as it feeds on stellar material.

Using radar data from our own world, Stanford researchers have proposed a new place to look for life on Jupiter’s icy moon.

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

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

Dr. Michio Kaku on what is likely and what is possible provides a stimulating vision of the future.

Cosmic bodies, like asteroids and comets, are constantly zooming through space and often crash into our planet.

The winged drone is designed to ride 200-mph Venusian winds.

Earlier in the Space Age, little thought was given to leaving what many call “trash” on the lunar surface.

“When I saw the data, I didn’t believe the analysis...This is the brightest Cow supernova seen to date."

Scientists have created a plan for interstellar travel. They plan to send tiny lifeforms to the nearest solar system.

Astronauts lose muscle mass in space. The secret to how ground squirrels keep mass in hibernation may help future space travelers keep their own.

Uplift Aerospace will transport valuable goods to the ISS and house them in their Constellation Vault starting this year.

Using ground telescopes and satellite observations taken over decades, researchers have identified the largest number of wandering rogue planets yet.

Scientists at TalTech are working on solar cell technology using microcrystals that are only about the size of a grain of sand — hoping to power a moonbase.

MIT is leading a privately-funded hunt for life in Venus’ clouds, scheduled to begin in 2023.

The same (former) NASA engineer who previously claimed to violate Newton's laws is now claiming to have made a warp bubble. He didn't.

How can you "touch the Sun" if you've always been inside the solar corona, yet will never reach the Sun's photosphere?

If a giant asteroid were to slam into Earth, well, we’d be in trouble. That’s why NASA is launching DART, the world’s first planetary defense mission.

Astronomers just discovered a black hole of a mass comparable to the Sun.It is small and not so far away, which opens the window to new discoveries.

Today, most of the universe's galaxies are already receding faster than the speed of light.

A Belgium startup expects to send their technology to the Moon by 2025 to improve the process of making oxygen via electrolysis.

We need to make outer space more Earth-like if we're going to inhabit it one day — let's start with the moon, not Mars.

The space race is heating up, but many legal issues are still open to debate.

Analyzing moon samples from the 1980s with a new laser technique shows we were wrong about the moon’s magnetic field.

With information garnered from marsquakes, researchers have created the first complete image of the interior structure of Mars.

Astronomers with the EMU Project have released a spooky image of “dancing ghosts” emanating from a pair of distant radio galaxies.

A metallic star is hurtling out of the Milky Way, propelled by a supernova explosion triggered after it ate its partner star as a white dwarf.

Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb’s new Galileo Project will hunt for alien technology using proven scientific methods and equipment.

A unique baby exoplanet surrounded by a disc of gas and dust could unravel some of the mystery surrounding planet and moon formation.

Using gravitational waves, astronomers have observed collisions between black holes and neutron stars for the first time.

Astronomers have created the first ever 3D map of the heliosphere, using satellite data to reveal the part of the universe influenced by our sun’s solar wind.

The biggest survey of stellar nurseries to date, PHANGS-ALMA, charts more than 100,000 star formation regions across our corner of the universe.

The Earth is circled by a sea of space junk, and it poses a danger to satellites and astronauts. We know we should...

A new simulation of star formation is the most realistic ever created, giving scientists an unprecedented opportunity to study the birth of a star.

A rare form of plutonium has been discovered on Earth for the first time — and an exploding star appears to have helped it get here.

More than 8,000 tons of space debris orbit Earth, endangering our astronauts and satellites. Can we clean up space before it’s too late?

A new algorithm lets astrophysicists produce high-res cosmological simulations of large parts of the universe far more quickly than was previously possible.

An in-development Interstellar Probe could explore an area 10 times farther away than any craft before it, providing an unprecedented look at interstellar space.

We now know about how much space dust — micrometeorites that may have seeded Earth with the ingredients for life — hits the planet every year.

For the first time, scientists have measured Mars’ core — and found it is much bigger than expected.

A distant exoplanet, GJ 1132 b, appears to have created a second atmosphere for itself after being stripped of its first.

Landing on Mars is just the beginning — to live there, we'll need to invent Martian concrete.

Water once flowed on Mars. But was ancient Mars’s climate hot and wet, or dry and glacial? Iceland may hold the answer.

Astronomers have discovered a first-of-its-kind cloudless hot Jupiter — and it could expand our understanding of exoplanet formation.

There's a lot of trash in outer space. We need to clean it up before it becomes unusable.

There are nearly 3,000 satellites in orbit, and all of them are subject to a breach in satellite security. Here’s how white hat hackers can help.

NASA was able to create a highly detailed 3D map of nearby brown dwarfs thanks to the efforts of 150,000 citizen scientists.

Scientists may have recorded the "hum" of the universe for the first time by measuring irregularities in gravitational waves.