Say hello to Pi Mensae c—a small, Earth-like planet located nearly 60 light-years from our Solar System. It’s probably not able to sustain life, but it’ll go down in history as the first exoplanet detected by NASA’s new TESS satellite.
Scientists using the Hubble Space Telescope have glimpsed a neutron star unlike any seen before.
How do you know where anything is in space? Sure, you can say, “Oh, that star, it’s the one in the middle of the Big Dipper,” but that’s not very useful in an era of incredible telescopes peeping at galaxies billions of light-years away. On January 1, 2019, scientists will adopt the newest, internationally…
Sitting atop Saturn’s north pole is one of the Solar System’s most striking weather patterns: a rotating, color-changing hexagon slightly wider than Earth. A new study shows there’s another hexagon directly on top of the first one—and that’s weird.
Accomplished astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell has won a $3 million Special Breakthrough Prize for her discovery of pulsars 50 years ago and continued leadership in science.
A new congressionally mandated report says NASA should refine its strategy and improve its tools to foster the study of exoplanetary systems and expedite the search for alien life.
What happens when a dead star meets a black hole? The answer appears to be a brief zombie awakening, according to a new paper. Let me explain.
Chile’s Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) has observed a galaxy that looks nothing like what researchers expected. It’s forming stars at an absolutely incredible rate.
Though it’s still 107 million miles from its target, the New Horizons spacecraft has caught a first glimpse of Ultima Thule, a mysterious Kuiper Belt object.
The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has announced where its Hayabusa2 spacecraft will attempt a landing on the asteroid Ryugu.
A team of researchers has spotted the signature of water ice in permanently cold traps near the Moon’s poles, a new paper reports.
The mere fact that we live in a universe boggles my mind every once in a while. But thankfully, our cosmic home is a place that follows rules; the laws of physics seem to agree everywhere, and galaxies are uniformly distributed throughout. Except for in this 300-million-light-year-long region, which seems to be…
The Universe’s earliest epochs appear to be written into the small dwarf galaxies orbiting our own galactic home, the Milky Way.
Scientists directly observed the signal of iron and titanium atoms in the atmosphere of an exoplanet 600 light-years from Earth, a new paper reports.
The bigger a telescope’s mirrors, the better resolution it has. Excavation has just begun on a new telescope that will be truly enormous, called the Giant Magellan Telescope.
Every once in a while, our planet captures a “mini-moon,” a tiny asteroid that hangs out in our orbit for a bit before venturing back into the depths of space. New research suggests these small, temporary natural satellites carry tremendous scientific and commercial opportunities—but the trick will be in finding them.
There’s an exoplanet whose surface is so hot, it rips apart water molecules. It’s almost a star, but not quite; it’s an ultra-hot, Jupiter-like world located around 880 light-years from Earth.
First, the bad news: Sunday is the anniversary of the disastrous white supremacist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that culminated in a neo-Nazi car attack that killed local woman Heather Heyer and wounded scores of others, as well as resulted in the deaths of two police officers. The organizer of…
The Parker Solar Probe blasted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on Sunday, setting itself on course to become both the fastest human craft ever launched (in the neighborhood of 430,000 miles per hour) and the first to probe the outer corona of the sun.
Globular clusters are among the most fascinating celestial phenomena in the galaxy, packing a hideous amount of stars into a relatively tiny region of space. Given the sheer number and variety of stars within these clusters, it seems reasonable to think they’d also be packed with life. But as new research suggests,…
