Category: Astronomy

Our sun is far from the smooth, unvarying ball of light we see in the sky. Up close, its “surface” rumbles with powerful eddies that routinely burp superheated material into…

Ever since learning the surface of the planet Mars is cold and dead, scientists have wondered if there was a way to make it friendlier to life. A team including…

NASA’s new asteroid-hunting spacecraft is taking shape at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. The NEO Surveyor (Near-Earth Object Surveyor) is a cutting-edge infrared space telescope that seeks out…

The team needs a fixed time and a location to prepare the airborne observation experiment. A controlled reentry would make that a breeze, but Cluster was not designed with this…

Previously, Gaia had explored asteroids known to have moons — so-called ‘binary asteroids’ — and confirmed that the telltale signs of these tiny moons show up in the telescope’s ultra-accurate astrometric…

A team of international astronomers using the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), part of the U.S. National Science Foundation National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), have gathered the most precise and…

Artificial intelligence is all the rage these days. When we think of AI, we’re usually thinking of uncanny “deepfake” images and Chat GPT’s written responses — but astronomers are actually…

The inaugural flight of Blue Origin’s New Glenn heavy-lift rocket, which will send NASA’s ESCAPADE mission on its way to Mars, now has a tentative launch date.  NASA announced on…

Newly released footage shows Chinese astronauts engaging in environmental monitoring and growing plants aboard the nation’s Tiangong space station.

A massive black hole ­– about 20,000 times the size of the sun – has been confirmed as the closest to our solar system by an international study involving University…