If our nearest star has an Earth-like planet, here’s how we’ll see it. As seen from up close, the signs of not only life, but our intelligent, technologically advanced human civilization […]

The contact binary system KIC 9832227 is worth another look. Astronomers have seen some incredible occurrences across space and time. The nova of the star GK Persei, shown here in an […]

With sodium-sensitive eyes, we’d see it every new Moon. With no detectable gases, the Moon appears to be atmosphere-free. The Moon as seen from a view above the majority of Earth’s […]

The rarest stars in the Universe are the ones we need the most to make humanity possible. Like everything in the Universe, stars are born, they live a little while, […]

Planets are either rocky, like Earth, or gas-rich, like Neptune, with no in-between. What are the different types of planets that exist in the Universe? If all you could see […]

An almost 40-year-old theory finally has ‘smoking gun’ evidence for it. During most of their lives, stars burn stably, changing imperceptibly. The rotten egg nebula, at lower right (and shown in […]

Despite all the challenges, Hubble has vindicated this discovery. Practically everywhere we look in the Universe, the large-scale objects that we see — small galaxies, large galaxies, groups and clusters of galaxies, […]

Despite Betelgeuse’s recent faintening and brightening, I’d bet on these stars instead. Betelgeuse, a nearby red supergiant, will someday explode. The black hole at the center of the Milky Way should […]

And either way, is energy or information conserved? When two things in the Universe that “always” occur meet one another, how do you know which one will win? Gravitational waves, […]

How slight differences could have forever changed our cosmic history. 13.8 billion years ago, what we know today as our Universe began with the hot Big Bang. Filled with matter, antimatter […]

Filaments, hundreds of millions of light-years long, were just caught spinning. In our own cosmic backyard, everything we see spins, rotates, and revolves in some fashion or other. Our planet […]

If you go young, blue, and massive, you top out at 50,000 K. That’s peanuts! Surprise! The biggest, most massive stars aren’t always the hottest. Although its neighbor, Messier 42, […]

How two seemingly distinct exoplanet systems turned out to be related. Practically every star in the Milky Way has a similar origin story. At some point in the past, a molecular […]

If you want to find life in the Universe, this is how you do it. When it comes to uncovering the ultimate truths about reality, we can only reap what we […]

An artist’s impression of what the fully-deployed James Webb Space telescope will look like from the perspective of an observer on the ‘dark’ (non-Sun-facing) side of the observatory. (NORTHRUP GRUMMAN) […]

With 5,000 square degrees of data, the Dark Energy Survey has something important to say. For as long as humans have been studying the Universe, we’ve yearned to know the answers […]

Our galaxy not only isn’t stationary, but different parts are accelerating at different rates. When we think about the Universe as a whole, the accelerations that objects experience from our […]

It’s a wild idea, but there’s a way to test it. No matter how far we look out in the Universe, there’s always more “Universe” to see. Even at the extreme […]

And a combination of all three might take us farther than ever. If you want to see the farthest objects in the Universe, you have to know not only where to […]

Or is ‘new space’ created in between the gaps of the ‘old’ space? It’s been almost 100 years since humanity first reached a revolutionary conclusion about our Universe: space itself doesn’t […]

The last image puts it all in perspective. Compared to what we find in our Solar System, galaxies are truly enormous. The Sun may be 109 times the diameter of […]

Even the ones hunting for aliens aren’t excited. Here’s the reason why. In this world, there are very few issues more polarizing than the notion of aliens. For as long as […]

Even after our merger with Andromeda, we might retain our spiral shape for trillions of years. You probably don’t think about it very often, but the Milky Way galaxy won’t remain […]

Is it groupthink? Or is there a deeper reason? In the early half of the 20th century, even after the discovery of the expanding Universe, physicists considered a wide variety of […]

Even addition has to play by different rules for black holes. How do you add 28 and 47 together? This simple math question helps us highlight the many different ways that […]

Deniers will never stop misleading others. Here’s the truth. Every so often, advocates of a fringe theory — one that doesn’t fit the evidence as well as the mainstream theory — do what they can […]

We can do so much more, so much faster, with the same data. When you think about how astronomy works, you probably think about observers pointing telescopes at objects, collecting data […]

We have to use the right definition for the specific question we’re asking. When it comes to the Universe, we frequently characterize objects by examining and reporting on their physical […]

Cosmic rays aren’t just limited by the speed of light. Even among non-scientists, it’s well-understood that there’s an ultimate speed limit to the Universe: the speed of light. If you’re a […]

And which ones are probably examples where we’ve fooled ourselves? Every once in a while — multiple times per year — a new research finding fails to line up with our theoretical expectations. In […]