Astronomy

Five years ago, the 10,000-ton, 56-foot Chelyabinsk meteor exploded over Russia with the force of 30 atomic bombs. Yesterday, an...

Neutron stars are definitely not the largest objects in the universe, but they are the most massive (aside from black holes).A typical...

Located in one of the closest star systems to our own at just 4.2 lightyears away, the exoplanet Proxima b seemed like a great...

Isaac Asimov's 1990 novel Nightfall takes place on Kalgash, a planet illuminated by a ring of stars that only sees nightfall once...

Stargazing into the night sky with a powerful telescope is cool and all, but we prefer the kind of constellation tracking that can be...

The galaxy cluster SDSS J0146-0929 is absolutely enormous, with hundreds of galaxies in close proximity and caught in each others'...

As one of the Milky Way's closest neighbors, you would think we'd see an entire star hiding inside the Small Magellanic Cloud, a...

There are a couple tenets astronomers and cosmologists live by: light sets the speed limit for the universe, nothing can escape a...

Astronomers can spot supernovas from a galaxy away (even quick ones), but observing individual stars is much harder. In the cosmic...

Despite how little we know about dark matter, we can tell when it's there, from the way it impacts galaxies and causes strange...

Drake Equation aside, there's one big obstacle to finding exoplanets that may support life: our own lack of imagination.   For...

For thousands of years, mankind has marveled at the impressive structures built by prehistoric civilizations and puzzled over how and...

Supernovas pack a lot of punch, to put it lightly--they can outshine galaxies and expel more energy than our Sun's lifetime output,...

Though KIC 8462852, also known as Tabby's star, is probably not host to an alien megastructure like a Dyson Sphere or an orbiting...

Most of the time, the difference between a star and a planet is pretty clear: a star is a huge ball that burns hydrogen and...

Lots of cosmic objects are given interesting nicknames, from the Cartwheel galaxy to the "Penguin and Egg" galaxy. So perhaps it...

Back in January, New Zealand-based spaceflight company Rocket Lab launched a controversial satellite called the Humanity Star into...

If you took all of planet Earth's supply of gold, melted it down (minus impurities), and attempted to fill as many Olympic-sized...

No, it's not Pluto. Unfortunately for die-hard astronomy fans, Pluto is still languishing in its dwarf planet classification, and now...

In the search for alien life, liquid water always seems to be the Holy Grail. Oceans are even better--oceans mean a lot of water and...