For much of the year, vast stretches of the Canadian Arctic sit under cloud or in polar darkness, invisible to ordinary cameras in orbit.
For most of the past sixty years, the search for life beyond Earth has been a search for places like Earth.
The Moon has a far side, not a permanently dark side: synchronous rotation keeps one hemisphere facing Earth while sunlight still moves across the whole lunar surface.
The Hubble Deep Field began as a ten-day stare into an apparently empty patch of sky near the Big Dipper and became one of astronomy's defining images.
A Webb-confirmed galaxy at redshift 14.44 adds to the evidence that bright, chemically active galaxies were present earlier and more often than many pre-Webb models predicted.
A careful look back at the 27 December 2004 giant flare from SGR 1806-20, what instruments recorded, and why the energy estimate depends on distance.
The popular picture of mining in space is precious metal: an asteroid packed with platinum, worth some unfathomable sum, towed home to make someone rich.
Jupiter-mass, squeezed into a lemon by the dead star it hugs, and wrapped in an atmosphere of almost pure carbon unlike any planet ever measured. The team that found it says it appears to break every known way of building a planet.
Harvard astronomer Jonathan McDowell has tracked every object in orbit since 1989 from a personal database — and as Starlink crossed 10,600 active satellites in June 2026, his private catalog became the number governments, reporters, and regulators cite.
Europa, the ice-covered moon of Jupiter, has a problem that turns out to be a clue.
Voyager 1 has been in flight for longer than most of the people on Earth have been alive.
Light leaves the surface of Proxima Centauri and arrives at Earth approximately 4.24 years later.
A coronal mass ejection carries roughly a billion tons of magnetized plasma from the Sun at millions of miles per hour, yet takes one to three days to reach Earth — leaving forecasters a warning window measured in hours, not the years it would take to harden a power grid.
The Cosmic Microwave Background is the oldest light there is, the faint heat left over from the Big Bang, released when the young universe first cooled enough to turn transparent.
For most of the time astronomers have thought seriously about other worlds, the basic numbers were missing.
Voyager 1 is the fastest and most distant object people have ever built. It left Earth in 1977 and, almost half a century later, it is still moving at about 17 kilometres every second, far quicker than any rifle bullet.
