Astronomy

Few cosmic vistas can excite the imagination like

What are those colorful rings around the Moon?

Jupiter looks a bit different in ultraviolet light.

What was so super about Wednesday's supermoon?

Does the road to our galaxy's center go through

A Full Moon at Perigee

Florida Northern Lights

Getting time on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is the dream of many astronomers. The most powerful space telescope currently in our arsenal, the JWST has been in operation for almost four years at this point, after a long and tumultuous development time. Now, going into its fifth year of operation, the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), the organization that operates the science and mission operations centers for the JWST has received its highest number ever of submission for observational programs. Now a team of volunteer judges and the institute's scientists just have to pick which ones will actually get telescope time.

Saturn's rings are turning as edge-on as we will see them for another 15 years. The planet awaits your scope high in the evening sky. Low in the dawn, the thin Moon approaches Venus.

The post This Week's Sky at a Glance, November 14 – 23 appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

Physics has a reputation for being dominated by men, especially a century ago, as quantum physics was just being invented – but there have been so many women who helped shaped the field since its inception

A small but unique mission to Mars is taking an innovative path to reach the Red Planet in late 2027.

The post ESCAPADE Mission Launches for a Long Trip to Mars appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

A research team has conducted the first systematic search for optical counterparts to a neutrino "multiplet," a rare event in which multiple high-energy neutrinos are detected from the same direction within a short period. The event was observed by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, a massive detector buried deep within the Antarctic ice.

The 57.7-foot-long Canadarm2 robotic arm extends from a data grapple fixture on the International Space Station’s Harmony module in this July 23, 2025, image.

Is Saturn's moon Enceladus habitable? There's ample evidence that the moon holds a warm ocean underneath its frozen surface, and that the building blocks of life are present in that ocean. But for life to arise and persist, the ocean needs to sustain itself for a long time, and new research shows that's exactly what's happening.

New evidence suggests the standard model of cosmology is wrong, but the results could resolve the long-standing Hubble Tension problem in modern cosmology.

Iron rusts. On Earth, this common chemical reaction often signals the presence of something far more interesting than just corroding metal for example, living microorganisms that make their living by manipulating iron atoms. Now researchers argue these microbial rust makers could provide some of the most promising biosignatures for detecting life on Mars and the icy moons of the outer Solar System.

Astronomers have deployed a survey with the most memorable and tasty acronym in astrophysics - SPAM, The Search for Protoplanets with Aperture Masking - to catch planets in the act of being born. Using Keck Observatory's most powerful instruments, researchers have just captured the closest ever view of a protoplanetary disk 400 light years away, revealing a telltale gap and clumpy structures that hint at a world coalescing from interstellar dust.

A new study argues that the Universe is decelerating, based on a correlation between the brightness of Type-Ia supernovae and the age of their host galaxies.

Tracking time is one of those things that seems easy, until you really start to get into the details of what time actually is. We define a second as 9,192,631,770 oscillations of a cesium atom. However, according to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, mass slows down these oscillations, making time appear to move more slowly for objects in large gravity wells. This distinction becomes critical as we start considering how to keep track of time between two separate gravity wells of varying strengths, such as on the Earth and the Moon. A new paper by Pascale Defraigne at the Royal Observatory of Belgium and her co-authors discusses some potential frameworks for solving that problem and settles on using the new Lunar Coordinate Time (TCL) suggested by the International Astronomical Union (IAU).

The images hammered into the sides of a goblet found in Palestine give us an idea of what people living more than 4000 years ago imagined the creation of the cosmos looked like