Astronomy

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...

Fact: staring directly at the sun is a bad idea. The bright light from our planet's star can cause genuine retinal damage to anyone...

Some things in our solar system never change. Saturn? It has those cool rings. Neptune? Has that cool blue color. Jupiter? Has a giant...

In a time of instant messaging and the ability to circulate data around the world with a minimal delay, sending and receiving...

We like to think we know a lot about space. We can identify the chemical composition of an exoplanet's atmosphere from light-years...

Life needs a couple basic things: Reasonable temperatures, a lack of stellar radiation, and liquid water.If Proxima Centauri b is any...

Out of the many tasks which involve the Hubble Space Telescope, one in particular involved an "Indiana Jones-type quest" (NASA's...

Some of the flashiest and most gigantic events we've seen out in space involve galaxies colliding into each other. A galactic merger...