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Despite the Sun’s high core temperatures, atomic nuclei repel each other too strongly to fuse together. Good thing for quantum physics!

Northern lights in the American South, clusters of huge geomagnetic storms—the Sun is throwing a tantrum right on schedule.

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.

As the Sun ages, it loses mass, causing Earth to spiral outward in its orbit. Will that cool the Earth down, or will other effects win out?

The Parker Solar Probe is about to undergo its seventh encounter with Venus on its journey toward the Sun. Here’s how fast it’ll go.

Sure, there’s less daylight during winter than summer, as your hemisphere is tilted away from the Sun. But darkness goes deeper than that.

It would get rid of our hazardous, radioactive, and pollutive waste for good, but physics tells us it’s a losing strategy for elimination.

Figuring out the answer involved a prism, a pail of water, and a 50 year effort by the most famous father-son astronomer duo ever.

For now, our Solar System’s eight planets are all safe, and relatively stable. Billions of years from now, everything will be different.

The cosmic scales governing the Universe are almost unbelievably large. What if we shrunk the Sun down to be just a grain of sand?

For centuries, Newton’s inverse square law of gravity worked beautifully, but no one knew why. Here’s how Einstein finally explained it.

Temperatures in the Sun’s core exceed 10 million degrees Celsius. But how on Earth did we actually come to know that?

Comet A3, also known as Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS, has sprung to life since 2024’s last equinox. Here’s how to catch the show for yourself.

Even if you aren’t in the path of totality, you can still use the solar eclipse to measure how long it takes the Moon to orbit Earth.

It could prevent sun damage and help chemical burns heal faster.

No matter how you define the end, including the demise of humanity, all life, or even the planet itself, our ultimate destruction awaits.

The least exciting of all eclipses, a penumbral lunar eclipse, foreshadows the spectacular show that April 8th’s total eclipse will bring.

There’s no upper limit to how massive galaxies or black holes can be, but the most massive known star is only ~260 solar masses. Here’s why.

So far, Earth is the only planet that we’re certain possesses active life processes. Here’s what we shouldn’t assume about life elsewhere.

Some say that the Sun is a green-yellow color, but our human eyes see it as white, or yellow-to-red during sunset. What color is it really?

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 astronomy, a star’s initial mass determines its ultimate outcome in life. Unless, that is, a stellar companion alters the deal.

Most stars shine with properties, like brightness, that barely change at all with time. The ones that do vary help us unlock the Universe.

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.

There are only a precious few minutes of totality during even the best solar eclipses. Don’t waste yours making these avoidable mistakes.

The structure of our Solar System has been known for centuries. When we finally started finding exoplanets, they surprised everyone.

It was barely a century ago that we thought the Milky Way encompassed the entirety of the Universe. Now? We’re not even a special galaxy.

Across all wavelengths of light, the Sun is brighter than the Moon. Until we went to the highest energies and saw a gamma-ray surprise.

An annular eclipse is coming to Earth on October 14, 2023. Six months later, a total solar eclipse is headed our way. Here’s the reason why.

The most iconic, longest-lived space telescope of all, NASA’s Hubble, is experiencing orbital decay as the solar cycle peaks. Here’s why.