A stunning new photo of Saturn’s north pole spotlights the planet’s bizarre hexagon-shaped vortex and beautiful bands of swirling winds. NASA’s Cassini spacecraft captured this dramatic view… Read more “Bizarre Hexagon on Saturn Shines”

If you want to see beautiful auroras, forget Alaska, Canada, and Iceland—check out Jupiter. At the gas giant’s north pole, the most powerful and luminous northern lights… Read more “If you like the northern lights, Jupiter takes them to the next level”

Minute Physics pieces together what we know about the great-great-grandfathers of galaxies that we see today. The Milky Way is just one of 100 billion galaxies in… Read more “The first galaxies came together in three minutes (video)”

It’s about 660 million times as massive as our sun, and a cloud of gas circles it at about 1.1 million mph. This supermassive black hole sits… Read more “Measuring a massive black hole”

NASA’s Dawn spacecraft has revealed marvelous sights on dwarf planet Ceres during its first year in orbit, including the mysterious bright spots in Occator Crater. See full-resolution… Read more “Unveiling Ceres”

Huddled in a coffee shop one drizzly Seattle morning six years ago, the astrobiologist Shawn Domagal-Goldman stared blankly at his laptop screen, paralyzed. He had been running… Read more “Debating Signatures of Alien Life”

Pluto’s largest moon may have gotten too big for its own skin. Images from NASA’s New Horizons mission suggest that Pluto’s moon Charon once had a subsurface… Read more “Charon: A possible ancient ocean?”

  The Hubble space telescope is 25 years old. It has been inspiring and astounding us by capturing previously unseen secrets from far-away galaxies, stars and black… Read more “17 of Hubble’s greatest space images”

Astronomers have spotted two huge waves of gas being “burped” by the black hole at the heart of a nearby galaxy. The swathes of hot gas, detected… Read more “Black hole caught ‘burping’ galactic gas”

Dione’s beautiful wispy terrain is brightly lit alongside Saturn’s elegant rings. The “wisps” are relatively young fractures on the trailing hemisphere of Dione’s (698 miles or 1123… Read more “Wisps Under the Rings”

Globular clusters are spherical-shaped or globular stellar groupings — hence the name — which can contain millions of stars. There are about 200 of them in the… Read more “A “ghost from the past” recalls the infancy of the Milky Way”

Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs), brief yet brilliant eruptions of cosmic radio waves, have baffled astronomers since they were first reported nearly a decade ago. Though they appear… Read more “Mysterious fast radio burst”

Weather patterns in a mysterious world beyond our solar system have been revealed for the first time, a study suggests. Layers of clouds made up of hot… Read more “Weather map of a distant world”

The search for signs of life in a mysterious star system hypothesized to potentially harbor an “alien megastructure” is now underway. Astronomers have begun using the Allen… Read more “Search For Intelligent Aliens Near Bizarre Dimming Star”

Astronomers have made the first direct discovery of a white dwarf star being orbited by a disintegrating minor planet that will ultimately collide into it. The observation,… Read more “Offering a glimpse into how the Earth could end its days”

One of the most powerful known magnifying lenses isn’t found on Earth. The lens is built from stars, gas and dark matter and lies about 4 billion… Read more “Using general relativity to magnify the cosmos”

Seeing as the Voyager-1 spacecraft has been in the news recently, here’s the story of a very special photograph that it took 23 years ago known as… Read more “A Portrait of Earth Shot From More Than 4 Billion Miles Away”

To our knowledge, this is the first time anyone has ever photographed a transit of the International Space Station of the Moon DURING a lunar eclipse. And… Read more “First Lunar Eclipse Ever Photographed with a Transit of the ISS”

Venus is back on NASA’s agenda. Today, NASA winnowed down the contenders for the agency’s next low-cost planetary science mission. Five finalists were announced from among 27… Read more “Venus and a bizarre metal asteroid are leading destinations for low-cost NASA missions”

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has unveiled in stunning detail a small section of the expanding remains of a massive star that exploded about 8,000 years ago. Called… Read more “Veil Nebula is a Supernova Remnant”

Nearly all black holes come in one of two sizes: stellar mass black holes that weigh up to a few dozen times the mass of our Sun… Read more “Astronomers identify a new mid-sized black hole”