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The universe is filled with galaxies — more than a trillion by some estimates — and we’ve only mapped a fraction of them. But answering some of the most pressing mysteries plaguing astronomers today, such as galaxy formation, dark e...

Friday, January 21 As the sky grows dark after sunset this evening, look west to catch a glimpse of the large constellation Pegasus, slowly flying toward the horizon in the coming hours. The most recognizable portion of this constellation is the a...

The farside of the Moon is a far different place from the nearside. It has a more rugged surface, chock-full of craters. It’s nearly devoid of the smooth, solidified-lava oceans that dot the side that faces us. And it has a different compositio...

For many, astronomy is a late-night pursuit. We anxiously wait for Sol to set and twilight to fade before we begin to enjoy the sky. But by doing so, we are missing an amazing matinee every day — one performed by the Sun. Our star is the perfec...

Most stars in the galaxy are spaced pretty widely apart, with light-years between neighboring systems. But stars are all moving in space, meaning sometimes brief, close encounters can occur as one flies particularly close to another. That’s ...

With more of us living in cities and urban environments, the problem of light pollution is all too familiar. Even those lucky enough to live outside large metropolises don’t escape untouched, because the sky near the horizon is often lost to sk...

You might be familiar with the famous Orion Nebula (M42), named for the constellation where it resides. But that bright target isn’t the only treasure hidden within the Hunter. This stunning shot captures the Flame Nebula (NGC 2024) in all its ...

At first sight, Venus seems an unlikely candidate for life. The temperature at the surface is 887 degrees Fahrenheit (475 degrees Celsius), hot enough to melt lead. The pressure is 90 times higher than on Earth. And the atmosphere is filled with sulf...

Many amateur astronomers know the familiar thrum of small motors guiding an automated telescope under a tranquil night sky. Powered by a computer within a plastic box attached to the scope, this technology allows for the quick and accurate targeting ...

One of the most coveted sights for skygazers is the zodiacal light, a tall cone of whitish light that climbs the mid-latitude sky before dawn in autumn and at twilight in the spring. The light comes from the Sun glinting off dust particles in the Sol...

On Feb. 7, 1999, a Delta II rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral, in Florida. Aboard the rocket was NASA’s unmanned Stardust probe. Stardust’s mission was to rendezvous with comet Wild 2. Stardust was designed to be the first spacecraft...

Friday, January 14 The Moon reaches apogee, the farthest point from Earth in its orbit, at 4:26 A.M. EST. At that time, our satellite will be 252,155 miles (405,804 km) away. With the bright Moon in Taurus tonight, let’s cast our gaze across...

It’s no place you’d want to go to fill up your water bottle or take a swim, but TOI-674b has water vapor. The newly found exoplanet was presented at this week’s series of virtual American Astronomical Society media briefings. (The o...

Think “bubbles,” and you may think “soap” or “gum.” But not Catherine Zucker, currently a Hubble Fellow at the Space Telescope Science Institute and a former researcher with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astro...

From the time Galileo first peered into his telescope until the middle of the 19th century, professional telescopes required the observer to look through an eyepiece. As a result, astronomers manually logged mountains of information and telescopic dr...

The debate over galaxies without dark matter has returned. In 2018 and 2019, a series of studies lead by astronomer Pieter van Dokkum of Yale University made the case that two galaxies — NGC 1052-DF2 and NGC 1052-DF4 — are devoid of dark ...

NASA has pulled off the most technically audacious part of bringing its newest flagship observatory online: unfolding it. On Saturday, Jan. 8, the operations team for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) announced that the observatory’s primar...

The constellation Auriga (pronounced or-EYE-guh) the Charioteer, a star pattern known by this name for several thousand years, is easy to recognize primarily because of its brightest star, Capella (Alpha [α] Aurigae). This luminary is the sixth...

In 1922, Australia was even more remote from the rest of the world than it is today. But when it came to astronomy, that year it was the centre of everyone’s attention. On Sept. 21, the shadow of a total solar eclipse would cross the entire con...