The Small Magellanic Cloud, a neighbor of our Milky Way galaxy, stuns in this ambassador's picture.
What factors impact how long it takes for a supermassive black hole binary to merge?
Astrobotic completed a successful series of hot-fire tests of its rotating detonation rocket engine prototype, marking a key milestone for the experimental propulsion technology.
AI algorithms can sharpen naturally blurry images taken by ground-based telescopes, revealing details otherwise visible only to space-borne machines like Webb and Hubble.
NASA is exploring ways to use a fleet of drones to explore the lunar south pole with an ambitious new MoonFall project.
The planet Uranus is a weird place. Not only does it roll around the Sun on its side once every 84.3 Earth years, it also sports a spindly set of rings corralled in some places by strange little moons. Two of those rings, the μ (mu) and ν (nu) rings are incredibly faint, which makes them challenging to study.
SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket stands in the vertical launch position ahead of the flight of the ViaSat-3 Flight 3 mission for Viasat. Image: SpaceX
SpaceX is preparing to launch its first Falcon Heavy rocket in more than a year and a half. The Monday morning flight of the triple booster rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center will feature the landing of the two side boosters at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.
Imagine holding a wine glass up to a candle (of course I had to pour a glass to try this.) The curved glass bends and distorts the flame, stretching it into arcs and rings of light. Now scale that up to the size of a galaxy, replace the glass with a trillion solar masses of matter, and the candle with an entire galaxy billions of light years away. What you get is one of the most beautiful and scientifically powerful phenomena in all of astronomy, a gravitational lens.
I watched Armageddon again fairly recently with Bruce Willis, oil drillers in space and an asteroid the size of Texas bearing down on Earth. Buried beneath the Hollywood chaos is a genuinely interesting question, what exactly could we do with an asteroid if we got our hands on one? As it turns out, the answer has nothing to do with blowing it up, sorry Bruce but everything to do with building a new world.
Finding planets used to be a painstaking business. Astronomers would fix their gaze on a handful of carefully chosen stars, watch and wait, and hope to catch the faint dip in starlight that signals a world passing in front of its host. It worked. It worked brilliantly. But it also meant we were fishing with a very small net in a very big ocean.
The farthest spacecraft from Earth, the Voyager 1 probe, has just shut down another instrument. The reason for this shutdown is that Voyager's mission team wants to conserve power, which the aging spacecraft is in short supply of. The instrument in question is the Low-energy Charged Particles (LECP) experiment, which the Voyager probes used to study solar wind and the interstellar medium (ISM). Basically, the decision was made to power down this instrument so humanity's first interstellar mission could continue exploring the Universe.
SpaceX will launch its Falcon Heavy rocket for the first time in 18 months on Monday morning (April 27), and you can watch the dramatic action live.
Antarctica, which harbors one of the harshest environments on Earth, would hardly seem to be a Valhalla for conventional astronomical observations. But for over a decade and a half, a French- and U.K.-led team of astronomers have been using a 40-cm telescope atop the high Antarctic plateau to look for transiting exoplanets.
The 2026 Breakthrough Prize honored advances in dark matter, quantum physics, gene editing and nonlinear mathematics.
"That moment of completion was incredibly rewarding, as I felt like I had finally represented the first quarter moon as it might appear in person."
From Arctic fjords and volcanic craters to medieval castles and coastal cliffs, here's where to get a clear line of sight to the total solar eclipse on Aug. 12, 2026.
The giant planets in our solar system—Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune—have challenged our understanding of planetary formation and evolution. Specifically, their atmospheric formations and compositions have provided awe-inspiring images from spacecraft and given scientists key insights into the interior mechanisms of these massive worlds. But what about exoplanets? What can their atmospheres teach scientists about their formation, evolution, composition, and interior mechanisms? And how do longstanding exoplanet models stack up against the real thing?
Lock up our hearts and throw away the key, because we have found love in space. Space prison movies, that is.
The private WorldView Legion 4 Earth-observing satellite snapped an amazing photo of the Hubble Space Telescope on April 23, 2026, a day before the obsevatory's 36th birthday.
From the first photographer star to the discovery of alien worlds, these night sky targets mark some of astronomy's greatest firsts.
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