Almost fifty years after his death, Frank R. Paul remains one of the biggest names in science fiction art and pulp magazine illustration. These visions of life on moons and planets throughout our solar system (recently posted to reddit with no attribution to Paul, his work, or his impact) provide us with another…

Flying into Jupiter's moon Europa is always a breathtaking sight. Cities cling to the reflective moon's icy crust, while vast farms swirl in the warm seas below the surface. Now that we've learned to cultivate the native flora and fauna for food, it's become the number one destination in the Jovian system.

As a gas planet, it's not exactly surprising that Jupiter is famous for its storms and clouds—indeed, Jupiter's most famous feature, the Great Red Spot, is a storm that's lasted perhaps 400 years and is at least twice the size of Earth. By those standards, the rare breaks in Jupiter's swirling cover are tiny, but they …

2012 was a remarkable year for jaw-dropping space imagery. Here, in no particular order, are our 22 favorite photos, videos, composites, timelapses and animations of the cosmos for the year.

At a time when many thought the Speed of Light was infinite, a few brave souls tried to come up with a definite number for it. Most of them failed. There was one guy, however, who wasn't even trying, but came up with a great way to guess. Take a look at how he took his measurement, and what it has to do with the moons…

Jupiter is not alone out there. Aside from its 62 moons, the massive gas giant is joined by two clumps of asteroids that orbit around the sun in the same orbit — what are called the Jovian Trojans. Not much is known about these ancient objects, but new data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) is…

Something just went down on Jupiter. Monday morning, at 11:35:30 UT, amateur astronomers glimpsed a brief but blazing flash of light in the upper reaches of the planet's cloudy atmosphere. If past observations are any indication, Jupiter may have just sustained a major impact event. If that's the case, the gas giant…

Our moon is a pretty big object. It's big enough to be a respectable planet in its own right, if it were orbiting the sun instead of the Earth. (Actually, it is orbiting the sun in a nearly perfectly circular orbit, that the Earth only slightly perturbs... but that's a topic for another day.) The Moon is a quarter the…

Not Saturn. Jupiter. Yes, Jupiter has rings. Did we just blow your mind?

Could there be life on one of Jupiter's moons? The European Space Agency is hoping to find out.