On September 28, 2026, SpaceX’s Starship successfully reached Earth orbit for the first time after 13 previous test flights, marking a major milestone for the rocket. It is now the largest rocket in h...

Gravity is the universal attraction of any two objects with mass. It is the reason we experience weight and stay firmly on the ground. But it’s also so much more than that. Nearly any interaction or p...

Nebulae are among the most visually stunning sights in our universe. A nebula is simply a cloud of gas and dust found in outer space, and their varied shapes and colors make them spectacular phenomena for night sky viewing. They also play important roles in the life cycle of stars, as both a place of birth and a place of death.

Space: the final frontier... For 60 years the Star Trek franchise has brought its viewers along for spectacular trips across the galaxy and back. Generations of physicists, astronomers, astronauts, an...

Have you ever wondered where to point your telescope? If you’ve ever looked into a listing of astronomical objects, you’ve likely noticed that many of the galaxies, nebulae, and more are labeled with ...

We’re about to get a whole new perspective of the universe. On August 30, 2026, NASA plans to launch the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, the newest telescope in a lineage including Hubble and Webb. With its specialized design and new technology, the Roman Telescope is poised to change the way we view the cosmos.

As of August 24, 2026, it will have been 20 years since Pluto was officially reclassified from planet to dwarf planet. While there are those who argue that Pluto didn’t deserve to be “demoted,” the hi...

Earth is the only planet we know in the entire universe to support life. In a universe as big as ours, life likely exists out there somewhere by sheer odds alone. But for now, Earth is all we know and...

In some parts of the world on August 12, 2026, day will temporarily turn to night as the Moon passes in front of the Sun, blocking its light during a rare solar eclipse. Throughout history, solar ecli...

We live in a universe that is 13.8 billion years old. But how much longer does it have left? And how will the universe meet its ultimate end? We can’t yet know for sure how the universe will end, but ...

The exoplanet LHS 1140 b was first discovered in 2017. It was immediately a planet of note because it orbited within its star’s habitable zone—just the right distance from the star to potentially supp...

Nothing in stargazing quite beats the experience of spotting a shooting star. For just the briefest of moments, a bright light streaks across the sky in a dazzling display. With the Perseids Meteor Sh...

Take a look into the early evening sky any night this summer, and you’ll see a bright light over the western horizon, just above where the sun set. It looks like an incredibly bright star, but it’s ac...

The Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory was launched in 2004 in order to study highly energetic events known as gamma-ray bursts. While it was originally planned to operate for a two-year mission, it has c...

Ever since Galileo pointed his telescope to the sky in 1609, telescopes have slowly revealed the universe to us. Over time, the telescopes got better, and so did the views they provided. But we starte...

In less than a week, on Sunday, June 21, summer will begin, at least in the Northern Hemisphere. But in the south, it will actually be the start of winter. Just how is it possible that two different p...

According to our best estimates, the universe is 13.8 billion years old. It goes without saying that that’s extremely old. But just how long of a time is 14 billion years? The human mind has a way of ...

On Saturday, May 30th, at 2:06 p.m. EDT, people across New England reported hearing two consecutive explosions strong enough to rattle buildings. The source was actually a meteor—a rock falling from o...

The International Space Station is a home above home for astronauts. The record-breaking space station has been permanently crewed for over a quarter-century and is a hub of science, essentially actin...

In the late nineteenth century, astronomers believed they had discovered canals on Mars. These obviously artificial structures had to be the work of a civilization on the Red Planet. The idea was so p...

One of the most iconic scenes in Star Wars is the famous twin sunset over Tatooine, a desert planet that orbits not one, but two stars. Science fiction often takes creative liberties with its fantasti...

Ask any number of people what the single most important tool in astronomy is, and almost universally, they will claim the telescope as their answer. With telescopes, we’ve been able to peer beyond our...

Everything you can see and touch is made up of matter. Matter is a fundamental building block of the universe. But, somehow, 85% of it is missing. When we look at all the stars, planets, asteroids, an...