"This study demonstrates the astonishing resilience of life that originated on Earth."
Astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy captured skydiver Gabe Brown falling across the sun in this precisely planned aircraft alignment, solar altitude, and jump, resulting in the striking image “The Fall of Icarus.”
The rock-solid stabilization of the Canon 12x36 IS binoculars maximizes the smaller objective lenses for steady, detailed views of the night sky.
The Milky Way contains more than 100 billion stars, each following its own evolutionary path through birth, life, and sometimes violent death. For decades, astrophysicists have dreamed of creating a complete simulation of our Galaxy, a digital twin that could test theories about how galaxies form and evolve. That dream has always crashed against an impossible computational wall.
It is a scientific consensus that water once flowed on Mars, that it had a denser atmosphere, meaning that it was once habitable. Unfortunately, roughly 4.2 to 3.7 billion years ago, Mars' rivers, lake, and global ocean began to disappear as solar wind slowly stripped its atmosphere away. For scientists, the question of how long it remained habitable has been the subject of ongoing inquiry. Whereas some scientists maintain that Mars ceased being habitable billions of years ago, recent research suggests that it experienced periods of habitability that lasted for eons.
An expanding universe complicates this picture just a little bit, because the universe absolutely refuses to be straightforward. Objects are still emitting light, and that light takes time to travel from them over to here, but in that intervening time the universe grows larger, with the average distance between galaxies getting bigger (yes, I know that sometimes galaxies can collide, but we’re talking on average, at big scales here).
I honestly don’t have a decent analogy for you to explain how the universe is expanding without a center and without an edge. It just does, whether we can wrap our minds around it or not. But I CAN give you a way to think about it.
A Falcon 9 rocket rises from its Cape Canaveral launch pad, shrouded in ground fog, carrying 29 Starlink satellites to orbit on Nov. 22, 2025. Image: Adam Bernstein/Spaceflight Now.
SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral in the early hours Saturday as the company continues to expand its network of more than 9,000 satellites for the Starlink internet service.
"If you were able to stand somewhat close to the white dwarf's pole, you would see a column of gas stretching 2,000 miles into the sky, and then fanning outward."
The Milky Way is the galaxy that contains our Solar System. It is a barred spiral galaxy, a massive collection of stars, dust, and gas bound together by gravity. From our perspective within one of its spiral arms, the Milky Way appears as a band of light in the night sky.
"That moment feels as enjoyable as heading out on a date."
Uranus is its closest to Earth all year on the night of November 21st, and you can find it easily in the evening sky using Sky & Telescope’s exclusive star chart.
The European Space Agency's Ministerial Council – more formally Council at Ministerial level – takes place in Bremen, Germany on 26 and 27 November 2025.
Satellite megaconstellations are quickly becoming the backbone of a number of industries. Cellular communication, GPS, weather monitoring and more are now, at least in part, reliant on the networks of thousands of satellites cruising by in low Earth orbit. But, as these constellations grow into the tens of thousands of individual members, the strain they are putting on the communications and controls systems of their ground stations is becoming untenable. A new paper from Yuhe Mao of the Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics and their co-authors hopes to alleviate some of that pressure by offloading much of the control scheme and network decision-making logic to satellites themselves.
The Orion crew module gets stacked onto the Space Launch System in preparation for the upcoming Artemis 2 mission in early 2026.
The astronomers estimate that this galaxy will deplete itself of gas in only a few hundred million years.
Saturn's rings are now the closest to edge on that they'll get. The famous interstellar comet has become higher and easier for amateur telescopes before dawn.
Image: The Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission takes us over one of Earth’s most extreme environments: the Danakil Depression in Ethiopia.
Image: Finding star clusters in the Lost Galaxy
The ESA/JAXA BepiColombo mission has been cruising towards Mercury since October 2018. With just one year to go until it arrives at its destination, what has the mission achieved so far? And what can we expect from its two spacecraft after they enter orbit around the Solar System’s smallest and least-explored rocky planet?
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