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Sun-like stars become brighter over the course of their long lives, which means that the Sun once provided Earth with far less heat than it does now - so much less, in fact, that life should have been impossible. More »
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While most proposals for future space exploration involve trips to the Moon or Mars, we don't actually have to land anywhere to break new ground. This plan would establish an outpost further from Earth than any human has ever gone. More »
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This extreme closeup of Saturn's moon Enceladus is the work of the Cassini orbiter, which snapped this awesome image way back in January 2011. Here, the satellite glows a golden brown as it basks in the light of its planet. More »
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Remember when the Church got all up in Galileo's grill for challenging the geocentric interpretation of the Universe? Seeing this almost makes you wonder if the Universe is still a little sore about that. More »
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Damn. This, ladies and gentlemen, is what stargazers call a globular cluster — a spherical grouping of gravitationally bound celestial bodies, swirling about deep in the inky blackness of space. [Hi-res available here] More »
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We've looked at the Carina Nebula before, but we've never looked into it. While the nebula is plenty beautiful in regular optical wavelengths, this infrared image allows us to peer behind the thick gas clouds to see the gorgeousness inside. More »
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This is devastating news. The BBC is reporting that ExoMars — a joint program between NASA and the European Space Agency with Martian missions scheduled for 2016 and 2018 — is on the ropes, owing to America's budgetary woes. More »
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The fierce ultraviolet radiation given off by the young stars of NGC 3324 has carved this giant cavity in space. And, thanks to our old friend pareidolia, that boundary between different gases looks an awful lot like a person's profile. More »
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Think of all the work that goes into getting a birds-eye view of our home planet. Now imagine how hard it would be to snap a photo that manages to capture our entire galaxy. More »
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Last week, NASA unveiled the highest-resolution photograph of Earth ever taken... or, rather, the highest-resolution photograph of half the Earth. More »
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We usually think of black holes as cosmic destroyers, heartlessly devouring anything — even a star — that enters their enormous gravitational pull. But there might be another, more helpful side to supermassive black holes that we're only just discovering. More »
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This newly discovered planet is just 22 light-years away. Its discoverers are calling it the "new best candidate" to support water, and possibly life. The planet's unique features could even make it the ideal home for creatures like the Predator! More »
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Have you ever wondered how breathtaking celestial images like this one came to be? Believe it or not, that isn't how they appear when telescopes like Hubble first lay their eyes on them, and getting them to look the way they do is actually a fairly involved process. More »
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Every so often, incredibly energetic charged particles will reach Earth - and we're not sure what could possibly be powerful enough to generate these cosmic rays. Now we might have the answer...and it's just an absurdly specific set of circumstances. More »
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Have you met Ebb and Flow? The twin spacecraft entered lunar orbit last month with aims of uncovering the mystery of the Moon's formation. More »
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NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer, or IBEX, has spent the last four years exploring the very edge of our solar system, where giant magnetic bubbles repel incoming charged particles while neutral ones stream in on their way to the Sun. More »
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Most images of nebulas make them look flat, so you aren't able to appreciate the true splendor of what a nebula would really look like if you were to fly toward it through space. But now you can. The Space Telescope Science Institute, which runs the Hubble and Webb telescopes, has been using data gathered by the telescopes to create 3D images of familiar nebulae. And as you can see from these videos, it looks breathtaking. Above, you can see a fly-by of the Helix Nebula, created when gas was blown off as a Sun-sized star collapsed into a white dwarf. This vid also lets you compare the original 2D image with the 3D rendering. More »
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Every cosmic phenomenon deserves its own unique claim to fame, but Abell 2052 deserves better than this. Its gas jerks back and forth like a drink sloshing around in a glass. It's like the cosmic equivalent of a tipsy uncle. More »
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You're all familiar with Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince, right? If not, drop what you're doing. Go read it. Then come back. More »
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Sailors have navigated by the light of Polaris for centuries, but all is not well with the North Star. There's something wrong with its light, and the best explanation might be that it's losing the equivalent of Earth's mass every year. More »
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This eerie patch of blackness in the middle of a busy star cluster may look like a rather misshapen black hole, but it's actually something even stranger. It's also quite possibly the loneliest, darkest, coldest place in the entire cosmos. More »
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Chalk another one up to NASA's Kepler Mission. The Agency's team of planet-hunters announced yesterday the discovery of 11 new planetary systems, which together harbor 26 brand spanking new planets. More »
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Robert Hooke discovered the cell, established experimentation as crucial to scientific research, and did pioneering work in optics, gravitation, paleontology, architecture, and more. Yet history dismissed and forgot him... all because he pissed off Isaac Newton, probably the most revered scientist who ever lived. More »
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Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has promised us a permanent Moon base by 2020. Many people have been calling Newt's vow a publicity stunt, while others have chimed in by attacking the idea of a lunar base in and of itself, with assertions like "real scientists know [a Moon base] is fantasy." More »
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Who would ever imagine that sand dunes could look so incredible? In this beautiful image, sand trapped in an impact crater in the Red Planet's Moachis Terra region have been sculpted by the winds of Mars into a vast and variegated landscape. More »
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These red dots represent some of the earliest galaxies known to astronomy. Located ten billion light-years away, they're only a few billion years older than the Big Bang. Their presence explains why we're now surrounded by massive elliptical galaxies. More »
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NASA has just released this mind-blowing photograph Earth, which was captured earlier this month by the Agency's most recently launched Earth-observing satellite, Suomi NPP. More »
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Last week, a swelling solar storm on the surface of the Sun sent a stream of charged particles hurtling toward Earth, making for beautiful northern lights in the planet's extreme latitudes. But late last night, at 10:59 p.m. EST, the now massive tempest unleashed an eruption that scientists expect will be responsible for Earth's largest solar radiation storm since 2005. More »
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Leonid Ksanfomaliti, an astronomer at Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, claims to have detected signs of life in 30-year-old photographs of Venus. Of course, that's completely ludicrous... isn't it? More »
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Feast your eyes on one of the most puzzling planetary mysteries our solar system has to offer. In this photograph of Saturn's north pole, captured by NASA's Cassini spacecraft in 2009, clouds can be seen encircling the planet at about 77 degrees north latitude. Even at such a high parallel, the massive six-sided jet stream has a diameter more than twice that of Earth's. More »
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Something very strange is happening around the star KIC 12557548. Its light dims every 15 hours, as though a planet is orbiting around it...except the dimming varies wildly each time around. A planet is being vaporized before our eyes. More »
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This absolutely gorgeous image from the European Southern Observatory reveals a planetary nebula, the short-lived phenomenon between the death of a star and birth of a white dwarf that has nothing to do with planets. More »
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If you've ever visited California's Yosemite National Park, then you have an appreciation for how absurdly majestic its scenery is. You also know how difficult it can be to encapsulate that majesty when describing it to others; somehow, adjectives like "breathtaking" don't even begin to describe it. More »
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Johann Elert Bode is the author of Bode's Law, one of the most contentious laws in astronomy. It's a ridiculous idea which juggles numbers, seemingly for no reason, and it ends up revealing the spacing of the planets in the solar system. Or does it? More »
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We can see Venus pass in front of the sun once every one hundred and twenty years. Ever since it's been observed, a strange thing has been happening. Instead of appearing as a dark circle moving across the sun, Venus formed a tear drop shape that slowly oozed onto the solar disc. It took three hundred years for scientists to understand the Black Drop Effect. More »
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Are you big on science and science communication? If you are, do yourself favor and check out ScienceOnline2012 (or scio12 to those in the know), the sixth annual international meeting on science and the internet. More »
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For the first time ever, scientists have witnessed and recorded a comet disintegrating in the Sun's atmosphere. The icy body — dubbed "comet C/2011 N3 (SOHO)" — was originally observed back in July. Today, the team that observed the comet flaming out of existence has published an in-depth analysis of what really happened. More »
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This gorgeous image is the work of the Spitzer Space Telescope, which snapped this infrared photo of the Cygnus-X star forming region in 2009. Every bright blue dot represents a star hotter and more massive than anything we can imagine. More »
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We now estimate that every star in the galaxy has at least one planet, but that is leaving aside the potentially billions more planets that were ejected from their solar system and are now hurtling through the universe all alone. More »
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You're looking at a once-in-a-lifetime scientific discovery. A team of experts announced today that these fragments of space rock, discovered last month near Foumzgit, Morocco, are in fact meteorites from Mars. More »
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