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Just a few years ago, astronomers witnessed something strange happening in a galaxy 848 million light-years away. The supermassive black hole (SMBH) at the center of this galaxy was chug [...]

NASA's Dawn mission revealed that the dwarf planet Ceres may have--or may once have had--an ocean. Now, new research provides evidence that the world might also hold the right stuff [...]

A seemingly ordinary galaxy has put on an extraordinary spectacle. About 300 million light-years away, the supermassive black hole in the galaxy SDSS1335+0728 suddenly came to life. A June 18 [...]

Since its launch, astronomers have been using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to peer back to a time when the first stars and galaxies were forming. Not only is [...]

THE COSMIC GEMS ARC is a galaxy that can only be seen through gravitational lensing, as an extremely dense foreground object bends and focuses the incoming light of a more [...]

A NEW ANALYSIS OF RADAR IMAGES taken by NASA's Magellan mission to Venus in the early 1990s has revealed indications of lava flows reshaping the planet's surface, according to a [...]

ON FEB. 23,1987, astronomers had an incredible front-row seat to a once-in-a-lifetime cosmic event: Just 168,000 light-years away, a star in the Large Magellanic Cloud collapsed in on itself and [...]

The distant dwarf planet Eris is nearly the same size as Pluto and occupies the same frozen region of our outer solar system, called the Kuiper Belt. It's so distant [...]

The Horsehead Nebula (Barnard 33) in Orion is an iconic target for backyard astrophotographers--and it was one of the first scientific targets for the European Space Agency's Euclid mission, which [...]

DRIVE OUT TO THE COUNTRY on a clear summer night and find the darkest place you can. Find the constellations Scorpius and Sagittarius, and look for dark regions amid the [...]

JANUARY 25, 2004, marked the start of a 90-day planned mission for NASA's six-wheeled, golf cart-sized Opportunity rover--one of two vehicles comprising the Mars Exploration Rover mission. Fifteen years later--eight [...]

Our galaxy is lousy with planets. NASA's exoplanet archive lists more than 3,400 confirmed planets outside our solar system, with more added every day. Nearly 4,500 planetary candidates from NASA's [...]

Late this year--or, more likely, early next--a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will launch a spacecraft to an orbit 62,000 miles (100,000 kilometers) high, three times the distance of geosynchronous orbit. [...]

The astronomers of Lowell Observatory were on a mission in 1930, driven by founder Percival Lowell to find a hypothesized ninth planet (dubbed 'Planet X') that would explain strange orbital [...]

By 1974, the United States and the Soviet Union had thrown some two dozen missions at Mars, with only a few sticking. The Mariner 4 flyby in 1964 revealed Mars--Earth's [...]

By 1995, astronomers had detected only one planet around a Sun-like star. Today, we have discovered more than 4,000 extrasolar planets. Of those, only about 50 are considered habitable by [...]

A recent study using data from the Cassini spacecraft has provided new insights into the hydrocarbon oceans on Saturn's moon, Titan. The research reveals evidence of tidal activity in Titan's oceans and suggests that their compositions vary. The study used data from Cassini's Radio Science Subsystem to create a bistatic radar system, which provided detailed information about the oceans. The findings also indicate that the rivers feeding the seas are primarily composed of methane until they mix with the ethane-rich open seas. Additionally, the study found that the seas have small surface waves, which may indicate the presence of tidal currents. This research provides valuable information for future missions and the potential exploration of Titan's seas. [Extracted from the article]

AFTER SOME 15 PROLIFIC YEARS on the martian surface, NASA's Mars Opportunity rover has gone silent. We talked to the NASA engineers and scientists whose lives have been touched by [...]

NASA's Jupiter orbiter, Juno, which arrived at our solar system's largest planet in July, has now been given new mission parameters: to stay in its 53-day orbit instead of burning [...]

TRAPPIST-1 has a solar system like no other. The tiny red dwarf is barely big enough to be considered a star, and its radius is just a hair larger than [...]

A signal from the center of the Andromeda Galaxy points to the existence of dark matter there. The gamma-ray emissions seem to come from several point sources in a tight [...]

The International Astronomical Union has accepted the New Horizons team's proposal on naming conventions for surface features in the Pluto system. Themes for Pluto surface names include mythological underworld deities, [...]

The planet HAT-P-2b orbits an F-type star slightly larger than the Sun. Eight times the mass of Jupiter, the planet orbits its sun in just over five days. As it [...]

Piers Sellers, meteorologist, NASA astronaut, and deputy director of the Earth Science Division at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, died December 23. He was 61. Sellers began working at NASA/GSFC [...]

Hubble has its iconic deep field filled to the brim with galaxies. Now the Chandra X-ray Observatory has one, too, peering at ancient galaxies and their massive black holes in [...]

At the center of the Milky Way lies Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), a supermassive black hole. Stellar tidal disruption events, during which stars are torn apart as they approach Sgr [...]

JAXA's Venus probe, Akatsuki, discovered something spectacular: a 6,200-mile (10,000 kilometers) structure in Venus' upper atmosphere. The entire bow-shaped wave stretched pole-to-pole and lasted about four days. The leading hypothesis [...]

PILE UP. Most astronomers think the Moon was formed from a primordial planet called Theia smashing into Earth and kicking up molten material that coalesced into the Moon. No one [...]

Conditions on Earth may have been ripe for life at two separate times. Selenium deposits in soil suggest a 1-billion-year gap between the first and second period, when life finally [...]

This January, the Keck Observatory was outfitted with the 5-ton Keck Cosmic Web Imager, which is tasked with mapping the 'cosmic web' that binds galaxies [...]

In the quest for the Google Lunar XPrize, the Moon Express team has raised enough private funding to afford its trip to the [...]

Researchers determining the mass, including dark matter, of the Milky Way are narrowing in on a number between 4.0 x 1011 and 5.8 x 1011 solar [...]

49 Librae, a star once thought to be 2.3 billion years old, is actually 12 billion years old. 49 Lib siphoned gases off a dying companion, which made it appear [...]

HD 172555, a 23 million-year-old star, shows evidence of vaporized comets. Their paths indicate the presence of a yet-unseen giant [...]

Research of meteorite dust falling to Earth over time reveals that much of it likely came from a single asteroid impact 466 million years [...]

The Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico determined that the fine structure constant (proton-to-electron mass) of the universe changes little over time, only 1.3 parts per million over 3 billion [...]

In 2022, there will be a spectacular sky show. Two stars will merge into one, pushing excess gas into an explosion known as a red nova. At magnitude 2, it [...]

Researchers have spoken out about geoengineering efforts, saying they could adversely affect telescope instruments while doing little to ultimately improve climate change [...]

STARING AT THE SUN. The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile turned up a turtle-shaped sunspot twice the size of Earth. ALMA is in the process of an upgrade [...]

You might as well call PSR J1119-6127 sasquatch because it seems to be a 'missing link' in neutron stars, according to astrophysicist Walid Majid of NASA-JPL. Majid, who presented his [...]

WEIRD GALAXY. Most galaxies are bound in fairly orderly groupings, but NGC 4696 is not like most galaxies. It's a member of the Centaurus galaxy group, about 150 million light-years [...]

Vera Rubin, a physicist who confirmed the existence of dark matter, died December 25, 2016. She was 88. After receiving her bachelor's degree from Vassar College in 1954, Rubin attempted [...]

A rocket full of garbage leaves earth Want to send all of Earth's garbage into the Sun? You may have a few problems--and not just because you'd need 168,000,000 Ariane [...]

A galaxy called the 'Spiderweb Galaxy' seems to be weaving itself beyond the embryonic states into a full-bore galaxy. As seen in the artist's depiction above, cold gas permeates the [...]

Of all the water worlds in the solar system, perhaps the most surprising is Ceres. For years the tiny dwarf planet, located in the asteroid belt, was thought of as [...]

Hydroxyl A chemical group with one hydrogen atom and one ionically charged oxygen atom. The highly reactive compounds behave similarly to alcohols. It was recently detected on the asteroid (and [...]

When stars die, they have a few options. Sun-like stars become objects known as white dwarfs: hot, planet-sized balls depleted of hydrogen. But larger stars collapse into city-sized neutron stars [...]

GET OUT OF HERE. The final stages of Pioneers 10 and 11, Voyagers 1 and 2, and New Horizons are all on escape courses out of the solar system. However, [...]

LOOKING THROUGH YOU. Long ago and far away, the galaxy IC 2163 merged with portions of another galaxy, NGC 2207, in a fashion similar to storms on Earth. NGC 2207 [...]

Thanks to the addition of the Coronagraphic High Angular Resolution Imaging Spectrograph, the Subaru Telescope atop Mauna Kea, Hawaii, can view nearby exoplanets and characterize their atmospheres, and provide other [...]