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Your online destination for news articles on planets, cosmology, NASA, space missions, and more. You’ll also find information on how to observe upcoming visible sky events such as meteor showers, solar and lunar eclipses, key planetary appearances, comets, and asteroids.

Wednesday, August 19, 2015

Solar system formation doesn’t mean a thing without that spin

New work from Carnegie’s Alan Boss and Sandra Keiser provides surprising new details about the trigger that may have started the earliest phases of planet formation in our solar system. For decades, it’s been hypothesized that our solar ...

Tuesday, August 18, 2015

Dark Energy Survey finds more celestial neighbors

Scientists on the Dark Energy Survey (DES), using one of the world’s most powerful digital cameras, have discovered eight more faint celestial objects hovering near our Milky Way Galaxy. Signs indicate that they, like the objects found by the s...

LADEE spacecraft finds neon in lunar atmosphere

The Moon's thin atmosphere contains neon, a gas commonly used in electric signs on Earth because of its intense glow. While scientists have speculated on the presence of neon in the lunar atmosphere for decades, NASA's Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Envir...

Monday, August 17, 2015

First use of ISS astronaut pictures for light pollution studies

Scientists are tapping into photographs taken by astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) to reliably measure the amount of light pollution worldwide. This study not only includes the well-known signatures of cities and streets, but al...

Celestial firework marks nearest galaxy collision

A spectacular galaxy collision has been discovered lurking behind the Milky Way. The closest such system ever found, the discovery was announced by a team of astronomers led by Quentin Parker at the University of Hong Kong and Albert Zijlstra at the ...

Friday, August 14, 2015

Hubble finds supernovae in "wrong place at wrong time"

Scientists have been fascinated by a series of unusual exploding stars — outcasts beyond the typical cozy confines of their galaxies. A new analysis of 13 supernovae — including archived data from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope — is ...

Thursday, August 13, 2015

Corrected sunspot history suggests climate change since the Industrial Revolution not due to natural solar trends

The Sunspot Number, the longest scientific experiment still ongoing, is a crucial tool used to study the solar dynamo, space weather, and climate change. It has now been recalibrated and shows a consistent history of solar activity over the past few ...

Astronomers discover "young Jupiter" exoplanet

One of the best ways to learn how our solar system evolved is to look to younger star systems in the early stages of development. Now, a team of astronomers has discovered a Jupiter-like planet within a young system that could serve as a decoder ring...

Wednesday, August 12, 2015

Oxymoronic black hole provides clues to growth

Astronomers using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the 6.5-meter Clay Telescope in Chile have identified the smallest supermassive black hole ever detected in the center of a galaxy. This oxymoronic object could provide clues to how larger ...

Tuesday, August 11, 2015

Rosetta sees comet's fireworks display ahead of perihelion

In the approach to perihelion over the past few weeks, the European Space Agency's (ESA) Rosetta spacecraft has been witnessing growing activity from Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, with one dramatic outburst event proving so powerful that it even p...

Astronomers discover a 10th transiting "Tatooine"

San Diego State University (SDSU) astronomers have discovered the 10th known "transiting circumbinary" exoplanet, which orbits two stars and therefore has two suns. Astronomers at the 29th International Astronomical Union General Assembly will annou...

Monday, August 10, 2015

Charting the slow death of the universe

An international team of astronomers studying more than 200,000 galaxies has measured the energy generated within a large portion of space more precisely than ever before. This represents the most comprehensive assessment of the energy output of the ...

Salt flat indicates some of the last vestiges of surface water on Mars

Mars turned cold and dry long ago, but researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder have discovered evidence of an ancient lake that likely represents some of the last potentially habitable surface water ever to exist on the Red Planet. The stu...

Friday, August 7, 2015

Gravitational constant appears universally constant, pulsar study suggests

Gravity, one of the four fundamental forces of nature, appears reassuringly constant across the universe, according to a decades-long study of a distant pulsar. This research helps to answer a long-standing question in cosmology: Is the force of grav...

Hubble finds evidence of galaxy star birth regulated by black hole fountain

Astronomers have uncovered a unique process for how the universe's largest elliptical galaxies continue making stars long after their peak years of star birth. NASA's Hubble Space Telescope's exquisite high resolution and ultraviolet-light sensitivit...

Thursday, August 6, 2015

From a million miles away, NASA camera shows Moon crossing face of Earth

A NASA camera aboard the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite captured a unique view of the Moon as it moved in front of the sunlit side of Earth last month. The series of test images shows the fully illuminated “dark side” o...

Cruise over Ceres in new video

Striking 3-D detail highlights a towering mountain, the brightest spots, and other features on dwarf planet Ceres in a new video from NASA’s Dawn mission.