Space News & Blog Articles

As the winter Milky Way rides high, open star clusters near and far, and from compact to sparse, await your binoculars or telescope, At dawn catch the Venus-Mars pair, and try for the closer Mercury-Saturn pair lower down.

Astronomers have found a black hole leaning decidedly askew in its orbit with a star.

Astronomers have found a fast radio burst — presumably a flash from a young stellar remnant — amongst the ancient stars of a globular cluster, challenging ideas about what produces these enigmatic flashes.

A visible glow from our sister planet’s nightside sheds new light on a 300-year-old observing enigma dubbed the “ashen light.”

How are stars born? One of the best places to test ideas about stellar birth is in Orion.

With the Moon gone from the evening sky, trace out Monoceros the Unicorn walking behind Orion. Spot the famous binocular star clusters at his eye and horn-tip, and don't miss M41 under Sirius. Meanwhile, the waning Moon, passes Venus, Mars and Mercury at dawn.

With the Moon departing the evening sky, now's a good time for a closer look at the northern winter Milky Way and its southern summer counterpart, too. No equipment required!

A high-resolution infrared image has revealed a dust screen obscuring a gas-devouring supermassive black hole in the center of the galaxy NGC 1068, confirming 30-year-old predictions.

The booster previously identified as SpaceX hardware turns out to be from the Chang’e 5-T1 mission. The timing and site of the impact remain the same.

A careful study of cosmological simulations shows that dark matter–less galaxies aren't impossible — just really rare.

Scientists examining ancient ice cores have found radioactive evidence of an extreme solar storm that took place in 7,176 BCE.

The Winter Hexagon hosts the Moon. Then Castor and Pollux nail the Moon. Then the Little and Big Dog stars arc gracefully away from it. Meanwhile in early dawn, Mercury, Venus and Mars continue as a triangle low in the southeast.

A minor space storm took down much of the latest Starlink batch shortly after launch.

A new instrument on a powerful telescope has enabled astronomers to discover another planet around our nearest stellar neighbor.

Where did Earth’s water come from? One of the oldest meteorites on Earth is adding new pieces to an old puzzle.

Seeing the same target again has the comfort of a beloved rerun, while offering the opportunity for new discoveries.

Gaseous mini-Neptunes may become rocky super-Earths when they lose their atmospheres. Now, astronomers have caught that process in action.

The combined power of citizen science and machine learning have led to the discovery of more than 1,000 new asteroids in archival images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.

There’s a massive star in our galaxy’s halo, far away from the usual star-forming haunts. How did it get there?

This is the part of the month when the evening Moon is at its telescopic best in many skywatchers' opinions, as the terminator sweeps across the middle of the Moon's disk. And in February, the Moon at these phases rides especially high. Jupiter sinks low in evening twilight, and a triangle of planets displays in early dawn.

A new radio survey reveals a complex and chaotic galactic center teeming with supernova remnants, star-forming regions, and mysterious filaments.