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Astronomy
NASA's only flagship X-ray telescope ever, Chandra, still works and has no planned successor. So why does the President want to kill it?
The least exciting of all eclipses, a penumbral lunar eclipse, foreshadows the spectacular show that April 8th's total eclipse will bring.
No matter how you define the end, including the demise of humanity, all life, or even the planet itself, our ultimate destruction awaits.
Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb claimed to track down and find alien spherules on the ocean bottom. Here's the sober truth.
Given enough time, all galaxies will expel their star-forming material and wind up dead. Is this the earliest one, or is it just asleep?
Galaxies don't simply feed their central supermassive black holes, but the activity generated inside affects the entire galaxy and more.
Ground-based facilities enable the greatest scientific production in all of astronomy. The NSF needs to be ambitious, and it's now or never.
To Fred Hoyle, the Big Bang was nothing more than a creationist myth. 75 years later, it's cemented as the beginning of our Universe.
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Is information intrinsic in our universe? NASA’s Michelle Thaller explains.
JWST has puzzled astronomers by revealing large, bright, massive early galaxies. But the littlest ones pack the greatest cosmic punch.
In 1957, humanity launched our first satellite; today's number is nearly 10,000, with 500,000+ more planned. Space is no longer pristine.
Leap day only comes once every four years, including in 2024. But the reason we have it, including when we do and don't, may surprise you.
The detection of two celestial interlopers careening through our solar system has scientists eagerly anticipating more.
For now, our Solar System's eight planets are all safe, and relatively stable. Billions of years from now, everything will be different.
Meanwhile meteorite hunters rushed to Berlin to find this most rare space rock.
Until the Apollo missions, we had no idea how the moon got here, just a series of educated guesses. They rewrote the story of the moon’s origins.
There are plenty of life-friendly stellar systems in the Universe today. But at some point in the far future, life's final extinction will occur.
So far, gravitational waves have revealed stellar mass black holes and neutron stars, plus a cosmic background. So much more is coming.
In the early stages of our Solar System, there were three life-friendly planets: Venus, Earth, and Mars. Only Earth thrived. Here's why.
For thousands of years, humanity had no idea how far away the stars were. In the 1600s, Newton, Huygens, and Hooke all claimed to get there.
Although many of Einstein's papers revolutionized physics, there's one Einsteinian advance, generally, that towers over all the rest.
Beyond the planets, stars, and Milky Way lie ultra-distant objects: galaxies and quasars. Here's how far back we've seen throughout history.
The case for why NASA should pivot to searching for current — not ancient — signs of life.
Although early Earth was a molten hellscape, once it cooled, life arose almost immediately. That original chain of life remains unbroken.
The Earth that exists today wasn't formed simultaneously with the Sun and the other planets. In some ways, we're quite a latecomer.
In 1924, Edwin Hubble found proof that the Milky Way isn't the only galaxy in the Universe.
The Universe didn't begin with a bang, but with an inflationary "whoosh" that came before. Here are the biggest questions that still remain.
NASA's Juno mission, in orbit around Jupiter, occasionally flies past its innermost large moon: Io. The volcanic activity is unbelievable.
As planets with too many volatiles and too little mass orbit their parent stars, their atmospheres photoevaporate, spelling doom for some.
It took 9.2 billion years of cosmic evolution before our Sun and Solar System even began to form. Such a small event has led to so much.