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Malcolm Hartley is an Australian astronomer who is best known for his discovery of 5 comets during the 1980s. He has been invited to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California […]

[I’m reviving my Blogs That Deserve a Bigger Audience (DABA) feature. If there is a blog that you think should be featured here, drop me a note.] Today the Crimson […]

“Two planets similar to Earth have been discovered circling the dwarf star Gliese 581. Using new, super telescopes, astronomers are now searching for signs of life.”

At the New Yorker last week, science journalist Jonah Lehrer penned a conversation-starting feature on the so-called “decline effect,” the tendency across scientific fields for a new and exciting finding […]

“Within twenty years, astronomy could become the first discipline where discoveries outpace scientists’ ability to keep up with them.”

Six months ago, in late April, Research teams at the NASA Infrared Telescope facility in Hawaii made an astonishing discovery. They found that both water ice and organic compounds exist […]

For decades, holograms have been seen largely on the screen, in sci-fi movies and TV shows like “Star Wars” and “Star Trek.” The famed holodeck on “Star Trek” was used […]

NASA’s $150-million, Wilkinson Microwave Anisotrophy Probe (WMAP) has been gathering information about the nature of our Universe for nine years and has changed the way we think about it forever.  […]

“Three volunteers running the distributed computing program Einstein@Home have discovered a new pulsar in the data from the Arecibo Observatory radio telescope.” Wired Science reports.

NASA is in a catch 22 situation.  Five years ago, Congress mandated by law that NASA should track 90% of all of the dangerous asteroids and comets that may threaten […]

A few weeks ago, rumors started swirling that the United Nations was going to nominate Mazlan Othman, a celebrated Malayasian astrophysicist, to be the UN’s first Space Ambassador.

The latest episode of Sci Fi Science, as usual, has generated e-mails from viewers that I would now like to address: Question One: You discuss evil aliens that might want […]

Gallup has released its latest tracking data on American views of NASA. As Gallup describes, according to the Sept. 14-16 poll, 56% of Americans rate the job NASA is doing […]

One self important minister who tends to LESS THAN FIFTY parishioners had national newscasters intoning sober pronouncements about his opinions on the Quran all this week? Are we serious? Is […]

A recent study by members of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics has been getting a lot of attention – one where it was suggested that we are very close to the […]

Researchers at SETI are using radio telescopes to listen specifically for signals that are “obviously engineered”—something that nature, at least as far as we know, can’t produce.

“There is certainly some strange power that has some overlook on me & directing my life,” Winslow Homer wrote in a letter to his brother late in his life. “That […]

According to the Voyager Interstellar Mission Web site, on June 28th of this year, Voyager 2 completed 12,000 days of continuous operation since its launch on August 20th, 1977. Each […]

When we look for signals from alien life in outer space, we see nothing and all seems to be quiet. The laws of probability tell us that the Universe should […]

The pessimist mourns the glass’s half-emptiness, the optimist rejoices that it’s semi-full and the engineer just thinks the glass is twice the size it should be. What would a space […]

Jill Tarter, Director of the Center for SETI Research, is searching for signs of extraterrestrial life. But what kinds of signals is she hoping to find? Tarter explains that her […]

When Jill Tarter was growing up, she remembers walking along the beach with her father, gazing up at the night sky. Well before she would become a leader in the […]

Up until just a few hundred years ago most people thought that the Universe was a stable, static place that had been here forever and would continue forever. Today we […]

IMAX Hubble 3D, hitting the theaters on March 19, features the most famous space telescope of all, the Hubble, launched in April 1990. Soaring above the earth’s atmosphere, it gives […]

The distances separating the stars are so vast that it would take a very advanced civilization—perhaps thousands or even millions of years more advanced than ours—to bridge those distances. In […]

What’s floating around out there in the cosmological zoo? The Harvard astronomer describes the major objects visible via telescope and the naked eye.

Tuesday marks the 30th anniversary of the historic eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington – and Eruptions readers share their memories on the blast that captivated the world.

NASA scientists have taken extraordinary photographs of former planet Pluto thanks to the technology of the Hubble Space Telescope, which has captured the spectacular gold-colored sphere.

The Hubble space telescope has caught Saturn’s twin auroras on camera during a rare equinox which reveals both polls of the planet lit up in a spectacular display.

NASA’s new planet-hunting telescope has found two mystery objects that are “too hot to be plants and too small to be stars” – neither of which fit any definition of known astro objects.