Astronomy

For nearly a century, cosmologists have relied on a simplified model of the universe that treats matter as uniform particles that don't interact with each other. While this approach helped scientists understand the Big Bang and the expansion of space, it ignores a fundamental reality, that our universe is anything but uniform. Stars cluster into galaxies, matter collapses into black holes, and vast empty voids stretch across space, all constantly interacting through gravity and other forces.

When most stars like the Sun die, they don't go out with a bang, they fade away as white dwarf stars, Earth-sized remnants that slowly cool over billions of years. For decades, it was thought these stellar corpses were poor candidates for hosting life because they cool predictably, giving any orbiting planets only brief windows in the "habitable zone" where liquid water could exist. But new research suggests this assumption may be fundamentally wrong.

Sometimes even the sky surprises you.

Think you know Pluto? From icy plains to planetary debates, this quiz dives deep into the mysteries of our solar system’s most controversial—and captivating—dwarf planet.

Jupiter, Venus and Mercury move into line formation predawn on Sept. 1

Auroras may be visible from Alaska to Illinois as an incoming cannibal solar storm could spark geomagnetic storm conditions tonight.

NASA plans to prioritize the fission reactor as power necessary to extract and refine lunar resources.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying 28 Starlink broadband internet satellites was launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida on Sunday, Aug. 31, 2025.

The Aurigid meteor shower hails from debris of the comet C/1911 N1 Kiess, which last visited the inner solar system 2,000 years ago.

A machine-learning algorithm spotted signs of “covert consciousness” in coma patients—in some cases, days before doctors could do so

Europe's Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer probe completed its Venus flyby on Aug. 31, keeping it on track to reach the Jovian system in July 2031.

Hundreds of thousands of people are at risk of losing homes, businesses—and lives—as giant “gullies” expand into cities across Africa

A total lunar eclipse will take place on Sept. 7-8, creating a spectacular blood moon effect.

A pair of solar eruptions may combine into a powerful "cannibal CME," boosting chances for dazzling auroras over Labor Day.

The EPA fired five agency employees who signed a June declaration decrying moves that contradict science and undermine public health, alongside four more served removal notices

One of the advantages of having so many telescopes watching large parts of the sky is that, if astronomers find something interesting, there are probably images of it from before it was officially discovered sitting in the data archives of other satellites that noone thought to look at. That has certainly been the case for our newest interstellar visitor, 3I/ATLAS, which, though discovered in early July, had been visible on other telescopes as early as May. We previously reported on Vera Rubin’s detection of 3I/ATLAS well before it was officially found, and now a new paper has found the interstellar object in TESS’s data going back to early May - and it looks like it may have been “active” around that time.

How exactly did the universe start and how did these processes determine its formation and evolution? This is what a recent study published in Physical Review Research hopes to address as a team of researchers from Spain and Italy proposed a new model for the events that transpired immediately after the birth of the universe. This study has the potential to challenge longstanding theories regarding the exact processes that occurred at the beginning of the universe, along with how these processes have governed the formation and evolution of the universe.

New research based on samples from asteroid Bennu show that the asteroid contains materials from throughout the Solar System. Some of its materials are from even more distant realms: the asteroid contains stardust from stars that existed long before our Solar System did.

What about the middle stages? The march from single-celled organisms doing their single-celled thing to intelligent creatures that can wield tools and leave feedback reviews about them?

Astronomers sometimes find conflicting data when trying to answer a question. This is a normal part of the scientific process, and it simply means that more data is needed to prove or disprove the theory they are trying to test. One prominent example of conflicting data in recent exoplanet research was that of planet GJ 1132 b, which either had or didn’t have an atmosphere, depending on which data set was being used. A new paper from researchers using more observational time on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) can now definitively say that, most likely, GJ 1132 b doesn’t have an atmosphere - and that finding has wider implications for exoplanet research more generally.