Space News & Blog Articles

July offers lots of pretty stars and constellations to check out, and you’ll get a personally guided tour of them by downloading this month’s Sky Tour astronomy podcast.

Disk Detective, a citizen science project dedicated identifying planet-forming disks around young stars, reports their latest results.

The Sun isn't exactly your typical star, but its light, warmth, and overall stability has helped lead to life on Earth.

Capstone, a small pathfinder spacecraft with a big mission, launched today to pave the way for crewed return to the Moon.

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission has found the impact site created March 4th. The crater might help reveal the impactor's identity.

The crescent Moon returns to the evening, crossing Leo. The five-planet lineup continues at dawn; catch it while you still can. And for skywatchers at northern latitudes, we're entering noctilucent cloud season.

Astronomers have mapped Orion in 3D to understand the origin of the large arc of Barnard’s Loop — and you can interact with the 3D image!

The Contreras wildfire has been threatening the historic Kitt Peak National Observatory in southern Arizona.

The International Dark-Sky Association’s has summarized more than 300 peer-reviewed studies on the effects of artificial light at night in an effort to help dark-sky advocates.

We'll have not one but many opportunities to enjoy a rare lineup of the bright planets over the next few weeks. Amazingly, they'll be aligned in order of their distance from the Sun.

The five naked-eye planets form a diagonal line in the dawn this week — in order of their distance from the Sun, no less. And the waning Moon visits each one in turn, day by day. The planetless evening sky features the Big Dipper hanging down, the Little Dipper floating up, Leo walking away, and the two brightest summer stars nearly straddling the zenith.

New observations show that a Mercury-like world and a comet-like object fell onto a white dwarf, indicating past orbital chaos.

New images of nearby galaxies and their surroundings reveal details in galactic formation and evolution — and puzzles that remain to be solved.

Hubble observations have revealed a stellar-mass compact object — a black hole or possibly a neutron star — wandering our galaxy.

Astronomers will use the newest data release from the Gaia mission to explore stellar tsunamis, Milky Way history, and more.

Changes to the design of Starlink satellite spacecraft have made them brighter again, though still dimmer than the original design.

When should we start thinking about cleaning up our space junk on Mars?

The waxing gibbous Moon shines with Spica, then occults Delta Scorpii. Meanwhile, all seven planets other than Earth are forming into a diagonal line across the east to southeast at dawn.

NASA’s Perseverance rover is recording the windy weather in Jezero Crater, chronicling its role in making the Red Planet dusty.

A new source of fast radio bursts raises questions about how much we really know about these mysterious flares.

We touch on the highlights of the memorable Tau Herculid meteor shower and also report on the recent outburst of the recurrent nova U Scorpii.