Mars’ moons are easily visible at night from the Red Planet. Larger Phobos is brighter, while smaller Deimos is still brighter than any star.

Through the early 1900s, astronomers disagreed on whether the universe was home to a multitude of galaxies, so-called “island universes,” or contained entirely within the boundaries of the Milky Way ...

Jupiter reaches its best apparition in a decade for northern observers and offers a wealth of detail. Joining in late evening is brilliant Mars, now a month from opposition. Saturn is visible in the ...

A study led by SETI Institute scientist Matija Ćuk proposes that Saturn’s bright rings and its largest moon, Titan, may have both originated in collisions among its moons. This study was accepted for ...

Asteroid 44 Nysa may be just past opposition, but it’s still placed perfectly for evening viewing in Cancer the Crab. Wait until a few hours after sunset, when Cancer is high in the eastern sky, and ...

Karen Meech doesn’t spend a lot of time digging through Earth’s rocks. An astronomer by trade, she is usually behind the telescope, investigating comets and looking for hints about how Earth got its ...

The 2022 Nobel Prize in physics recognized three scientists who made groundbreaking contributions in understanding one of the most mysterious of all natural phenomena: quantum entanglement. In the ...

The Moon has always beckoned. Long before our ancestors realized “wandering stars” were actually planets sharing the solar system with Earth, they recognized the Moon was a sort of sibling to our ...

Sometime around the year 1837, a strange object passed an invisible cosmic mile marker: 1,000 astronomical units from the Sun. (One astronomical unit, or AU, is the average Earth-Sun distance.) For ...

On May 1, 2019, the star next door erupted. In a matter of seconds, Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to our Sun, got thousands of times brighter than usual — up to 14,000 times brighter in the ...

In the past half-century, just over 60 women have flown in space. In contrast, more than 500 men have made the trip during that same period. Clearly, Earth’s space agencies have a long way to go to ...