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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.

Friday, October 23, 2015

Last of Pluto’s moons — mysterious Kerberos — revealed by New Horizons

Images of Pluto’s tiny moon Kerberos taken by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft — and just sent back to Earth this week — complete the family portrait of Pluto’s moons. Kerberos appears to be smaller than scientists expect...

Thursday, October 22, 2015

Final kiss of two stars heading for catastrophe

Using ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), an international team of astronomers has found the hottest and most massive double star with components so close that they touch each other. The two stars in the extreme system VFTS 352 could be heading f...

Cosmic “death star” is destroying a planet

The Death Star of the movie “Star Wars” may be fictional, but planetary destruction is real. Astronomers announced today that they have spotted a large rocky object disintegrating in its death spiral around a distant white dwarf star. The...

Wednesday, October 21, 2015

First discovery of a magnetic field in a normal delta Scuti star

Two types of pulsating stars exist among stars with a mass between 1.5 and 2.5 solar masses: the delta Scuti stars and the gamma Doradus stars. Theory tells us that when such stars have a surface temperature between 12,000 and 12,900° F (6,600 an...

Scientist gives “outlaw” particles less room to hide

Studying the highest-energy particles in the cosmos provides scientists with a way to test how well they understand the cutting edge of physics. Recently, scientists using a giant particle detector at the South Pole have set records for the highest-e...

Tuesday, October 20, 2015

Most Earth-like worlds have yet to be born, according to theoretical study

Earth came early to the party in the evolving universe. According to a new theoretical study, when our solar system was born 4.6 billion years ago, only eight percent of the potentially habitable planets that will ever form in the universe existed. A...

The IBEX spacecraft sets the “gold standard” for understanding the interstellar material surrounding our solar system

Data from NASA’s Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX), led by Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), allowed a team of international researchers to provide the most definitive analyses, theories, and results about the “local” interst...

Monday, October 19, 2015

Study questions dates for cataclysms on early Moon, Earth

Phenomenally durable crystals called zircons are used to date some of the earliest and most dramatic cataclysms of the solar system. One is the super-duty collision that ejected material from Earth to form the Moon roughly 50 million years after Eart...

Dust particles from afar

When the solar probe Ulysses embarked on its 19-year-long exploration tour in 1990, the participating researchers turned their attention not only to our Sun, but also to significantly smaller research objects: interstellar dust particles advancing fr...

Friday, October 16, 2015

Mound near lunar south pole formed by unique volcanic process

A giant mound near the Moon’s south pole appears to be a volcanic structure unlike any other found on the lunar surface, according to new research. The formation, known as Mafic Mound, stands about 2,600 feet tall (800 meters) and 47 miles acr...

Closest northern views of Saturn’s moon Enceladus

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has begun returning its best-ever views of the northern extremes of Saturn’s icy ocean-bearing moon Enceladus. The spacecraft obtained the images during its October 14 flyby, passing 1,142 miles (1,839 kilometers...

Thursday, October 15, 2015

To save on weight, a detour to the Moon is the best route to Mars

Launching humans to Mars may not require a full tank of gas: A new Massachusetts institute of Technology (MIT) study suggests that a martian mission may lighten its launch load considerably by refueling on the Moon. Previous studies have suggested t...

What smacks into Ceres stays on Ceres

A new set of high-velocity impact experiments suggests that the dwarf planet Ceres may be something of a cosmic dartboard — projectiles that slam into it tend to stick. The experiments, performed using the Vertical Gun Range at NASA’s Am...

Wednesday, October 14, 2015

Hubble’s planetary portrait captures new changes in Jupiter’s Great Red Spot

Scientists using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have produced new maps of Jupiter — the first in a series of annual portraits of the solar system’s outer planets. Collecting these yearly images will help current and future scientist...

Famous exoplanet scientist steps down after sexually harassing students

Last Friday, BuzzFeed News broke the story that a Title IX investigation by the University of California, Berkeley, found in June that legendary exoplanet scientist Geoff Marcy had violated his university’s policy between 2001 and 2010 by sexua...

Cassini begins series of flybys with close-up of Saturn moon Enceladus

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft will wrap up its time in the region of Saturn’s large icy moons with a series of three close encounters with Enceladus starting today, October 14. Images are expected to begin arriving one to two days after the f...

Tuesday, October 13, 2015

Blast waves in the Sun’s atmosphere

Two teams of researchers led by Nariaki Nitta from the Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Center in the U.S. and by Radoslav Bucík from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Germany have independently discovered a new so...

VLA reveals spectacular “halos” of spiral galaxies

An international team of astronomers used the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) to study 35 edge-on spiral galaxies at distances from 11 million to 137 million light-years from Earth. The study took advantage of the ability of the VLA, following ...

Monday, October 12, 2015

New Horizons finds blue skies and water ice on Pluto

“Who would have expected a blue sky in the Kuiper Belt? It’s gorgeous,” said Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator from Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), Boulder, Colorado. The haze particles themselves are likely gray...