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What's incredible about this stunning photograph isn't just that it captures the path the sun appears to take across the sky from the summer solstice to the winter solstice. It's that it was taken with such a simple device: a pin-hole camera made from a drink can. More »
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There have been some great images and video of Comet Lovejoy's close encounter with the Sun, but this video put together by Scott Wiessinger from Goddard Spaceflight Center combines and zooms in on the best views from the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), which adjusted its cameras in order to watch the trajectory. More »
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The Sun can eject billions of tons of particles at velocities up to a million miles an hour. These solar storms are incredibly difficult to predict, but a recently developed citizen science project lets you help track these storms from right behind your keyboard. More »
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Clear skies and geographical location permitting, Saturday will be your last chance to spy a total lunar eclipse until 2014. Here's what you need to know to catch a glimpse before it's gone. More »
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Did you catch last week's solar eclipse? Did you even know there was a solar eclipse last week? It's okay if you didn't — turns out it was only visible from high latitudes in the southern hemisphere, so chances are you wouldn't have been able to spot it anyway. More »
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What you're seeing here is the photographic time-lapse of the Arctic summer as photographed in Iceland this past June. More »
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What you see in this amazing video really is just a coincidence. A comet smashed into one side of the Sun just as a massive explosion ignited on the other side. Two entirely unrelated events...but they sure look awesome together. More »
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What costs a billion euros, can operate in temperatures in excess of 500 degrees celsius, and orbits the sun closer than any spacecraft in human history? More »
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No, Earth hasn't suddenly migrated next to the Sun, but everything else about this picture is awesomely real. This is a plasma eruption from sunspot group AR 1302, the most recent solar storm to wreak havoc on Earth's magnetic field. More »
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This image is either a closeup look at a dark sunspot moving across the Sun, or a particularly fiery view of the gates of hell. Either way, this is clearly somewhere that's dangerous to even look at, let alone visit. More »
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It's decently likely that, sometime in the future, a major solar storm will hit Earth, wreaking havoc on our infrastructure and crippling our satellites. But there's a more long-term danger: space could become too dangerously radioactive to stay there. More »
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Earlier today, the Sun fired the biggest solar flare we've seen thus far in our current solar cycle. With an X-ray magnitude of X6.9, this flare was three times larger than the previous titleholder, a X2.2 from mid-February. More »
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Trojan asteroids are objects that share a planet's orbit around the Sun but reside in what are basically gravitational dead zones. We've discovered Earth's first Trojan asteroid...but how did it get there, and why have we only just found it? More »
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The Solar Dynamic Observatory has captured a lot of fascinating shots of our nearest star, but this might be the kookiest. NASA went through the spacecraft's images of the Sun's surface and a grimacing countenance revealed itself. More »
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Last week saw Neptune Day, the first anniversary - in Neptune years - of the planet's discovery on September 23, 1846. That got us thinking: what are the "birthdays" for all the other planets? Here's a handy, mildly insane guide. More »
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Comets will occasionally come a little too close to the Sun and crash into a fiery oblivion, but until now we had never been able to see it as it happened (though there have been some fake comet-smashes-the-sun videos circulating online). Witness the last moments of a sun-grazer comet. Blink and you may miss it - look at the photo below to see where the comet enters the frame. More »
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Located just 4.3 light-years away, the Alpha Centauri star system is our closest neighbor. But theirs is a very different solar system, as it's home with not one, not two, but three stars. Here's the short guide to Alpha Centauri. More »
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The Sun has been unusually quiet lately, with the solar wind the slowest it's been in 50 years and the sunspot cycle reduced to nothing more than the occasional belch. But don't believe reports that this spells doom for humanity. More »
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This picture was taken by a NASA solar observatory yesterday, and it shows one of the biggest explosions we've ever seen on the sun. For perspective, look at the upper left corner. There's a little circle the size of Earth. More »
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The geological evidence suggests that there have been liquid oceans on Earth dating back at least 3.5 billion years, a fact that was crucial to the emergence of the very first lifeforms. The only problem is that that's utterly impossible. More »
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Scientists have know for a while that the core of a sunspot is invariably darker than the area around it. It's also much cooler than the rest of the sun's surface. But why? New research published in Science picks apart the cause, and provides some gorgeous sunspot images in the process. More »
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If you're hungry for apocalyptic images (and who isn't?) I recommend this video, of a comet spotted by an amateur astronomer earlier this month as it smashed dramatically into the sun. That's right, even a wee comet made of nothing but ice and rock can cause a giant flame to leap from the sun's surface as it hits. More »
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White dwarfs are the ultra-dense husks of stars like our own, dying remnants that are just a pale shadow of their former glory. But when two white dwarfs come together, they can create something very special: a brand new star. More »
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The most recently discovered mineral is krotite, which was recently discovered in a meteorite fragment. Krotite has never been seen in nature before now, and yet its origins reach right back to the birth of the solar system. More »
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This video from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory tracks five new sunspots as they twist and turn on the Sun's surface. Amazingly, all of these sunspots are bigger than the Earth and have more energy than a million nuclear bombs. More »
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The Pioneer 10 and 11 probes are currently heading out of the solar system, but they're not quite doing it quickly enough. This physics-defying anomaly has stubbornly defied explanation, but an old computer graphics technique has finally solved the conundrum. More »
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This is what it looks like when the Earth eclipses the sun. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory captured this breathtaking image of our planet's shadow partly swallowing up the sun — something that happens twice a year from the satellite's viewpoint. More »
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NASA's Messenger probe has already taken thousands of photos of Mercury's surface after coming into orbit around the planet earlier this week. And it's got plenty still to do, including searching for hidden pockets of ice on Mercury's boiling surface. More »
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In the search for Earth-like worlds, astronomers look for conditions that are roughly the same as those on our planet. But the assumption that most Earth-like planets will be found around stars like our Sun might not necessarily be true. More »
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The recent exoplanet spotting by NASA's Kepler probe revealed there might be more than a million Earth-like planets in our galaxy. Now a new estimate says as many as 1 out of every 37 sun-like stars has an Earth-like world. More »
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The universe is mostly empty, but once in a great while stars get close enough to crash into each other. Two stars recently combined to form Sco V1309. Find out what happened when they did. More »
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A cloud of ionized gas floats over the surface of the sun, in this mind-blowing photo by Alan Friedman. Using a filter that only records a narrow wavelength of light emitted by hydrogen, Friedman captured the sun's texture... and eruption. More »
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Last Friday, NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory captured this video of a partial solar eclipse, which shows the Moon blotting out the edges of the Sun in most unusual fashion, seemingly reversing direction as it moves. What's going on here? More »
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A recently released video shows what seems to be two suns setting in China. This strange, otherworldly sight could just be a hoax, but similar optical illusions have been seen before. The only problem is we still haven't explained them. More »
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This video starts with the Moon, runs through our solar system's rocky and gas planets, and then takes us from our regular-sized Sun to the biggest hypergiant star, all to a pulse-pounding beat. Prepare for a crash-course in cosmic scale. More »
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The Sun is entering a period of seriously intense solar activity, releasing huge volleys of charged particles and plasma blobs into space, including the recent Valentine's Day X-class flare, the most extreme in years. So how much of a threat do these flares really pose, and how prepared are we for a seriously disruptive solar storm? That, as it turns out, is a seriously tricky question to answer. More »
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Earlier this week, the Sun emitted its first X-class solar flare in about four years. The most powerful form of solar flare, this particular flare has lit up a massive region on the Sun's southern hemisphere...and any of our readers in the far northern or southern latitudes will be treated to some particularly amazing auroras over the next few days. More »
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This image, snapped by the Japanese probe Hinode on February 1, looks way more terrifying than it actually is. Most of the top half of the Sun seems to have fallen into a massive black hole, but it's not quite that dramatic. It's actually a coronal hole, a gigantic opening that allows the Sun to vent excess gas. Still, I'd feel a lot better about this if there wasn't another gigantic hole down at the Sun's south pole. More »
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Today, NASA's twin STEREO probes finally situated themselves on opposite sides of our Sun and are able to beam back an uninterrupted image of our Solar System's star. Check out a video of the STEREO probes' combined vantage points. More »
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Back on January 4, the Moon moved in front of the Sun, almost completely blocking our view of the Sun back on Earth. The Japanese-American Hinode satellite snapped this absolutely incredible photo of the eclipse from up in space. More »
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