Science

A pioneering NASA robot detected over a thousand quakes on Mars. It also may have revealed a huge reservoir of water. Planetary scientists used unprecedented data collected by the space agency’s InSight lander, which recorded geologic activity on Mars for four years, to reveal that water may exist many miles down in the Martian crust....

Mars didn’t lose all its water without a fight. The planet, today 1,000 times drier than the driest desert on Earth, gradually lost its insulating atmosphere. The Red Planet’s once great Martian lakes and rivers evaporated some 3 billion years ago, and the rocky world plunged into a global freeze. But some pools of water...

If you’re close to the U.S.-Canadian border tonight, you’re in luck. The Northern Lights may be sticking around a little longer, giving you another opportunity to catch a glimpse of the breathtaking natural light show. The aurora borealis has already begun showing up across northern part of the U.S. since the weekend, with people in...

There’s supposedly nothing special about a blue moon. A full moon is just a moon phase, and a blue moon is just a designation for certain full moons — the ones timed to fall before the end of a month that already had one full moon. True, unless it’s like the bizarro blue moon we’re...

Black holes are misunderstood. They’re almost inconceivably dense objects, which grants them immense gravitational power. (If Earth was hypothetically crushed into a black hole, it would be under an inch across.) Not even light can escape, if it falls in. But black holes aren’t incessantly sucking up everything in space like a vacuum cleaner (if...

Perhaps surprisingly, the majority of stars in the galaxy are not sun clones but smaller orbs of gas and plasma known as red dwarfs, about half the size of Earth’s star.  Astronomers have had their sights set on these stars as tantalizing places to look for habitable worlds for a while now. Not only are...

Somewhere in the galaxy, an advanced alien civilization might harness energy from its star. And NASA wants to know if it could detect this activity. The space agency has some powerful telescopes — and it’s building more. As scientists increasingly peer at other rocky, Earth-like worlds, they evaluated whether it’s possible to pick up signs...

Mercury is a little-known, still mysterious world. But one thing is certain. Mercury, the closest planet to the sun, can’t actually travel backward in retrograde, and doesn’t impact us on Earth. The notion of Mercury retrograde, a common reference in astrology wherein communication and travel are temporarily impaired, can, of course, be a fun musing....

A pair of U.S. astronauts who test-piloted a new Boeing spaceship in June may not fly home on the craft they rode in on.  While Boeing has conducted a variety of tests in space and on the ground to try to better understand problems with its Starliner capsule, now docked at the International Space Station,...

Long ago, Mars teemed with water. New imagery captured by the European Space Agency’s Mars Express orbiter depicts the planet’s once watery past. The spacecraft, which has orbited the Red Planet for two decades, snapped views of the eroded remains of once sprawling Lake Eridania — which the space agency noted was larger than any...