What if alien life — or even intelligence — don’t look like what we’re searching for? When the original Star Trek premiered, it was revolutionary for depicting sentient, intelligent species other than humans, living […]

The ‘big discovery’ is nothing of the kind. We need a new planet-finding mission to probe the next frontier. Last week, NASA dropped a bombshell that it’s Kepler mission — the greatest […]

If you haven’t finished your holiday shopping yet, consider these 10 gifts, good any time of year! One of the hardest things when it comes to holiday shopping is to find […]

Last week, Cassini plunged into Saturn’s atmosphere. Here are the top 6 things we learned from it while it was alive. “Being a scientist and staring immensity and eternity in the […]

No other object this large has come so close to Earth in millions of years. In the 5th millennium, we might suffer the consequences. “Honestly, if you’re given the choice […]

It isn’t about saving us from aliens at all. “To be on my very first spacewalk, to be outside, and to have contamination in my suit to the point that I […]

The red planet is nearby, cool, sunny, and was once potentially habitable. Could it someday be that way again? “It would be great some day to have astronauts in a rover […]

After a generation, we’re finally getting another close-up view. With the science we’re learning, we just might solve its mysteries. “Jupiter instead cooled down below the threshold for fusion, but […]

Meet LISA, the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna. Yes, it’s giant LIGO, in space, and it’s happening! “Einstein’s gravitational theory, which is said to be the greatest single achievement of theoretical […]

Past or present, if there’s ever been any life at all, it changes everything. “They say once you grow crops somewhere, you have officially ‘colonized’ it. So technically, I colonized […]

What Hubble sees at its best is only a tease for what James Webb will deliver. “With the Hubble telescope and all the other things that are out there, I believe […]

There’s a lot to learn about other worlds, but you can’t learn it all without looking up. “One should not need a teleportation device to decide whether a newly discovered object […]

The red planet once wasn’t so different from Earth. Here’s what happened. “Mars’ atmosphere is so thin, you do not need a lot of streamlining. By the time the ship […]

We take for granted how much the Moon does for Earth, but not all of the changes would be bad. “If we get rid of the moon, women, those menstrual cycles […]

If Scotty beams you up for a trip around the Sun, here’s how to handle it. “I really didn’t have to work, shall we say, with Star Trek. It was a […]

Why Saturn’s Iapetus has three great mysteries… and we’ve only solved one of them. “The dance between darkness and light will always remain — the stars and the moon will always need the […]

The outer three can even be seen with a small, 1.5 meter telescope. This 2010 picture of three of the four known exoplanets orbiting HR 8799 represents the first time […]

Why weightlessness is possible, even if there’s no place you can hide from the Universe’s longest-range force. “It was a strange lightness, a drifting feeling. Zero gravity. I understood that […]

And what it found was a world swimming, literally, with possibilities. Just as a Chihuahua is still a dog, these ice dwarfs are still planetary bodies. The misfit becomes the […]

As if the north pole of Saturn weren’t weird enough already. “Cassini is different — it’s a mission of enormous scope and is being conducted in grand style. It is much more sophisticated […]