Astronomy

Taking vitamin D2 supplements seems to reduce levels of vitamin D3 in our body

A newly discovered comet is already visible with binoculars.

Can our Sun become dangerous?

How does your favorite planet spin?

The steerable 60 foot diameter dish antenna of the

The dark, inner shadow of planet Earth

Can you spot famous celestial objects in this image?

Chimpanzees are consuming significant levels of alcohol from their diet of ripe fruit and the finding may help explain the origins of humans’ taste for alcohol

Chimpanzees are consuming significant levels of alcohol from their diet of ripe fruit and the finding may help explain the origins of humans’ taste for alcohol

Researchers have dated the appearance of microbial life in a 78 million year old impact crater. Life colonized the fractured hydrothermal system the impact created, and thrived for millions of years. It could do the same on other worlds.

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope recently imaged an extremely large and symmetric protostellar jet at the outskirts of our Milky Way galaxy. From tip to tip, this protostellar jet is 8 light-years across, about double the distance from our Sun to its closest neighboring star system, Alpha Centauri.

You know, if you take away the lack of air and water, the weaker Sun, the lower gravity, and the toxic soil, Mars isn’t all that bad of a place to live.

It seems like most of the planets have fled the evening scene. But that’s about to change this week. Saturn reaches opposition on Sunday, September 21st, passing closest to the Earth at just over 8.5 Astronomical Units (AU) or 1.3 million kilometers distant, and rising opposite to the setting Sun. This marks the best time to view the ringed world, as it dominates the night sky from sunset until sunrise.

When considering the unnamed major features of all the moons, asteroids, and comets in our solar system there are still a lot of places out there that need proper names. That means the International Astronomical Union (IAU), the non-governmental body responsible for naming astronomical objects, has its work cut out for them. Recently they tackled a relatively easy challenge by approving a series of names on the asteroid Donaldjohnson, the first and only target of NASA’s Lucy mission in the main asteroid belt. With those names come a whole new way to talk about one of the asteroids that humanity has studied most closely thus far.

Earth has a new co-moving neighbour. It's a new member of the group of asteroids that follow Earth-like orbits and are called quasi-satellites. Together, they constitute an asteroid belt.

Here we fly through Gaia’s new 3D map of stellar nurseries. This new map includes 3D-views of the Gum Nebula, the North American Nebula, the California Nebula, and the Orion-Eridanus superbubble. It allows us to fly around, through, and above these areas containing stellar nurseries. At the end of the animation, we arrive at our Sun.

Blue Origin's breakthrough in-space resource utilization system aims to turn lunar regolith into solar arrays, metals, and breathable and propellant-grade oxygen, enabling sustainable robotic and human Moon missions and future Mars exploration.

A swarm of fragments from an air burst comet could've triggered the Younger Dryas cooling period. A wave of megafauna extinctions followed, as did the disappearance of the Clovis culture.

One possibility to explain the constants of nature is that there’s more than one universe.