Astronomy

What are those curved arcs in the sky?

Over 500,000 light years across,

This galaxy is not only pretty -- it's useful.

What kind of clouds are these?

The Expanse: Osiris Reborn looks set to be the next big RPG, and a major breakout moment for developer Owlcat Games.

Blue Origin is flying more than 40 science payloads on board its 35th New Shepard suborbital spaceflight, scheduled to launch on Saturday (Aug. 23) from West Texas.

Satellites operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration watched Hurricane Erin as it swirled off of the U.S. coast on Aug. 11, 2025.

The 33rd SpaceX commercial resupply services mission for NASA, scheduled to lift off from the agency's Kennedy Space Center in Florida in late August, is heading to the International Space Station with an important investigation for the future of bone health.

Using stem cells from mice, researchers from Kyoto University tested the potential damage spaceflight can have on spermatazoa stem cells and the resulting offspring. After six months aboard the ISS, the stem cells were used to successfully produce healthy offspring.

A set of instruments shut off almost 50 years ago are still producing useful results. It’s the seismometers left by the Apollo missions to monitor moonquakes, which as the name suggests are earthquakes but on the Moon.

Comets are like the archeological sites of the solar system. They formed early on, and their composition helps us understand what the area around the early Sun was like, potentially even before any planets were formed. A new paper from researchers at a variety of US and European institutions used the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) to capture detailed spatial spectral images of comet 12P/Pons-Brooks, which is very similar to the famous Halley’s comet, and might hold clues to where the water on the Earth came from.

In 2022, astronomers announced the discovery of GJ 3929b. It's a rocky planet, similar to Earth in both mass and size. Astronomers have examined the planet with the JWST and concluded that it's a barren world with no atmosphere.

The JWST has found another moon orbiting Uranus. It's the planet's 29th known moon, and it bears the uninspiring, temporary name S/2025 U1. It's too small and faint to be detected by the Hubble, or by Voyager 2, the only spacecraft to visit the ice giant.

Neil Armstrong almost made a mistake. He had found an interesting rock sticking out of a formation. Curious to see what the rock was made of, he needed to examine its interior more closely. So he reached for his hammer and took a swing.

Earth’s atmosphere is large, extending out to around 10,000 km from the surface of the planet. It’s so large, in fact, that scientists break it into five separate sections, and there’s one particular section that hasn’t got a whole lot of attention due to the difficulty in keeping any craft afloat there. Planes and balloons can visit the troposphere and stratosphere, the two sections closest to the ground, while satellites can sit in orbit in the thermosphere and exosphere, allowing for a platform for consistent observations. But the mesosphere, the section in the middle, is too close to have a stable orbit, but too sparse in air for traditional airplanes or balloons to work. As a result, we don’t have a lot of data on it, but it impacts climate and weather forecasting, so scientists have simply had to make a lot of assumptions about what it's like up there. But a new study from researchers at Harvard and the University of Chicago might have found a way to put stable sensing platforms into the mesosphere, using a novel flight mechanism known as photophoresis.

A new theoretical study by University of Virginia astrophysicist Jonathan Tan, a research professor with the College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences’ Department of Astronomy, proposes a comprehensive framework for the birth of supermassive black holes.

New images from NASA's Psyche spacecraft show that its cameras are working just fine. By pointing them at Earth and the Moon, NASA was able to test the spacecraft's cameras and science instruments. Since both bodies reflect light like Psyche, and since their spectra are familiar, it's a valuable opportunity to test and calibrate the instruments.