Eclipses don't happen at random — they arrive in pairs, on schedule, and 2026 brings two spectacular seasons to prove it.
SpaceX launched NASA's Crew-12 mission with a quartet of astronauts aboard Crew Dragon Freedom today (Feb. 13), bound for an eight-month stint on the International Space Station.
As more satellite megaconstellations continue to be launched, researchers are exploring the odds people could be struck by falling debris from reentering spacecraft.
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Watch the liftoff of ESA astronaut Sophie Adenot to the International Space Station (ISS), aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 40 at NASA’s Kennedy Space Centre. Sophie flies as mission specialist. The other Crew-12 members are NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, respectively commander and pilot of the mission, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrei Fedyaev, mission specialist.
Three planets await in the western twilight, though low Venus is a toughie. The crescent Moon passes them and, for the lucky, occults Mercury. After dark, Dog and Hare accompany Orion. And try for Kemble's Cascade.
Somewhere around the year 774 CE, the Sun erupted with extraordinary violence. High energy particles slammed into Earth’s atmosphere, triggering nuclear reactions that produced radioactive carbon-14. Trees across the planet absorbed this carbon and locked it into their wood, preserving a record of that ancient solar storm that scientists can still read today.
Image: For Valentine’s Day, the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission sends love from space, capturing the heart-shaped oasis of Faiyum, just south of Cairo, Egypt.
Every so often (in geologic time) Earth's magnetic field does a flip. The north and south magnetic poles gradually trade places in a phenomenon called a geomagnetic reversal. Scientists long thought this happened every ten thousand years or so. However, new evidence from deep ocean cores show that at least two ancient reversals didn't follow that script. One took about 18,000 years to flip and the other took 70,000 years. Such lengthy time lapses could have seriously affected Earth's atmospheric chemistry, climate, and evolution of life forms during the Eocene period of geologic history.
Astronomers might have spotted a star in the Andromeda Galaxy collapsing directly into a black hole, without the accompanying fanfare of a supernova.
Take a time out for upcoming interstellar voyages, alien invasions, and animated galactic adventures
In 2004, the ESA's Mars Express orbiter detected methane in Mars' atmosphere. This was followed in 2013 and 2014 when the Curiosity rover detected a methane spike and organic molecules while exploring the floor of the Gale Crater on Mars. Curiosity detected an even larger spike in 2019 while exploring an outcropping of layered bedrock, which is part of the larger formation known as "Teal Ridge." Since that time, scientists have looked for possible explanations for the sudden detections of this organic molecule, which generally favored non-biological processes.
SpaceX will launch the latest batch of astronauts to the International Space Station early Friday morning (Feb. 13), and you can watch the action live.
Astrophotography with remotely operated telescopes is easier than you might think.
A Vulcan Centaur rocket successfully launched two U.S. spy satellites on Feb. 12 despite suffering an anomaly with one of its solid rocket boosters, echoing the result of an October 2024 mission.
Here's a different approach to recording deep-sky targets over natural and urban landscapes.
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At 16:45 GMT/17:45 CET the first Ariane 6 rocket with four boosters lifted off from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana on 12 February, taking 32 Amazon Leo satellites to orbit.
Dedicating multiple nights to a single target can lead to surprising results.
Four years ago, astronomers spotted a distant supermassive black hole swallowing an entire star. The star had wandered to close to the SMBH, and the black hole's powerful gravity prevented its escape. It was a tidal disruption event (TDE), and now, four years later, the energy output from the TDE is still rising.
Astronomers have discovered a planetary system that appears to flip one of astronomy's most reliable rules on its head.
Here's how to reveal the reflected light of stellar explosions photographically.
Astronomers tracked a star in Andromeda as it dimmed and vanished without the usual fiery explosion, offering rare clues to how black holes form.
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