On other planets, blue skies and red sunsets aren’t the norm.
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Conjunctions this close are rare, but give humanity an opportunity to view our Solar System’s faintest planet. With eight planets orbiting our Sun, any two will eventually appear close together from […]
At 35 light-years away, it’s also the 2nd coolest, 2nd widest planet ever found. Despite discovering more than 4000 exoplanets, most remain obscure. Although more than 4,000 confirmed exoplanets are known, […]
The surface and atmosphere is colored by ferric oxides. Beneath a very thin layer, mere millimeters deep in places, it’s not red anymore.
Science doesn’t exist in a cultural and existential vacuum and its teaching shouldn’t either.
The full Moon is always a sight worth looking at. This March, the full Worm Moon is a little more “super” than usual. The full Moon is always a spectacular sight: […]
The Moon, Venus, and Jupiter are the brightest night sky objects. On Thursday evening, November 28, they’ll all align, plus Saturn, too. As the planets orbit the Sun throughout the year, […]
The solar system has some strange stuff in it. Learning how it ended up that way can tell us where we’re going.
The Crab Nebula goes back to 1054, opening a window into our cosmic past. On July 4, 1054, Chinese astronomers recorded a “guest star” in the Taurus constellation. A ‘guest star’ […]
We once thought the Moon was completely airless, but it turns out it has an atmosphere, after all. Even wilder: It has a tail of its own.
Catch Saturn at its biggest and brightest, and view its rings while you still can. Right now, in Earth’s skies, Saturn appears at its biggest and brightest. A view of tonight’s […]
Saturn’s Iapetus, discovered way back in 1671, has three bizarre features that science still can’t fully explain.
Even with leap years and long-term planning, our calendar won’t be good forever. Here’s why, and how to fix it.
Migrating our planet to a safer orbit might be the only way to preserve Earth after all the ice melts.
The view from beyond Pluto is far enough from Earth that we can see the stars shift. NASA’s New Horizons, humanity’s first spacecraft to encounter Pluto, is more than 4.3 billion […]
In 2006, Pluto was demoted in a very controversial decision. Unless you ignore nearly all of planetary science, it’ll never be one again.
The “overview effect,” experienced by astronauts when they view the Earth from outer space, irrevocably changes your perspective as a human.
If we’re migrating slowly away, is our speed changing, too? Every year, planet Earth completes one revolution around the Sun while spinning on its axis. On a year-to-year basis, our […]
An unprecedented number of new satellites threatens the night sky as we know it. Will we act in time to save it?
We’re not made out of the densest elements, but we’re the densest planet nonetheless. Here’s why. Of all the planets, dwarf planets, moons, asteroids and more in the Solar System, only […]
On the morning of March 31, 2020, these three worlds will be at their mutual closest in 20 years. For the past few weeks, Mars, Saturn, and Jupiter have all shone […]
There are three factors all competing to determine the fate of the Earth, and the one that’s winning now won’t win in the end. If you could measure the average distance […]
Galaxies can have regions both hotter and colder than the background radiation of the Universe. When we talk about the depths of space, we get this picture in our heads […]
When it comes time for humanity to pick a new home, where will we go?
The Sun will eventually become a red giant star, swallowing Mercury and Venus in the process. But what will happen to Earth? There are a few existential questions we can ask […]
The largest moon in our Solar System, often overlooked, is a water-rich world. Does that mean life? Here on Earth, life took hold very early on in our planet’s history, and […]
Leap years will only get us through the next few thousand years before we have to fix it. With every year that passes, we assume that two separate things will both […]
Since the late 1800s, what we know has advanced light years ahead.
Why do some people still believe that behavior is caused solely by genes or environment? A new paper offers some answers.
There are exposed planetary cores orbiting stars, and we may have already found them. When we take a look at the planets in our Solar System, there’s a pretty clear difference […]