Search Results

It’s the best-known transcendental number of all-time, and March 14 (3/14 in many countries) is the perfect time to celebrate Pi (π) Day!

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 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 […]

Water is vital for life. Luckily for spacefaring humans, the solar system is full of it.

A newly discovered “ultrahot Jupiter” has the shortest orbit of any known gas giant.

Earth is the Solar System’s only known inhabited planet. Could Venus, if its phosphine signal is real, be our second world with life?

The most momentous and significant events in our lives are the ones we do not see coming. Life is defined by the unforeseen.

Whether they’re gas giants or rocky planets makes all the difference for life. Over the past 30 years, we went from not knowing if there were planets like ours around other […]

The most feared sexually transmitted disease (STD) of the last half-millennium was usually named after foreigners, often the French.

Ultraviolet LED lights could soon be used to help disinfect air and surfaces in buildings, planes, subways and other spaces.

The idea of “absolute time” was our default for millennia. But time is relative, as gravity and motion both cause time to dilate.

Unless you have a critical mass of heavy elements when your star first forms, planets, including rocky ones, are practically impossible.

Binary black holes eventually inspiral and merge. That’s why the OJ 287 system is destined for the most energetic event in history.

When people pick the greatest scientist of all-time, Newton and Einstein always come up. Perhaps they should name Johannes Kepler, instead.

We’ve only seen Uranus up close once: from Voyager 2, back in 1986. The next time we do it, its features will look entirely different.

Even though the leftover glow from the Big Bang creates a bath of radiation at only 2.725 K, some places in the Universe get even colder.

From Ramses II to Alexander the Great, these leaders helped shaped the world we know today.

If you think you know how an astronomical nova works, buckle up. You’re in for a ride like you never expected.

The eastern inner core located beneath Indonesia’s Banda Sea is growing faster than the western side beneath Brazil.

All scientific theories, at some level, are wrong. That’s why consensus is so vital. There are two important and common words that, when used scientifically, have a very different meaning than […]

Find a clear western horizon after sunset, and this ‘triple treat’ of a dance can be yours. Every once in a while, the night sky provides a spectacular feast for our […]

At four million solar masses, the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole is quite small for a galaxy its size. Did we lose the original?

What we’ve seen isn’t necessarily what we get, but the most common world doesn’t look like ours. There’s a very common myth out there in astronomy: the idea that the Sun […]

A Mercury-bound spacecraft’s noisy flyby of our home planet.

If you had a clear western horizon, you had your shot at this view! On September 9, 2021, the Moon and Venus nearly overlapped. A simulated view of the post-sunset skies […]

The past ~4 billion years have been an incredibly successful, unbroken run for life on Earth. The future won’t be nearly so bright.

In 1990, we only knew of the planets in our own Solar System. Today, the exoplanet count is more than 5000. Here’s what we’ve learned.

Puerto Rico’s iconic telescope facilitated important scientific discoveries while inspiring young scientists and the public imagination.

It rotates on its axis, revolves around the Sun, moves throughout the Milky Way, and gets carried by our galaxy all throughout space.

Want some crazy space phenomena? You don’t have to leave the neighborhood for it.