Science

It’s taken more than half a century, but NASA really is going back to the moon. Some of the space agency’s astronauts have been training in the Northern Arizona desert for the looming Artemis 3 mission, which is currently slated to land in September 2026. Decades of other U.S. space priorities (such as the Space...

On a large, rocky world in a far-off solar system, a year goes by in just half a day. Astronomers are continually finding unique planets in deep space, and a new survey just revealed 15 new planets, including a unique super-Earth. These are rocky worlds some 30 to 70 percent bigger than Earth, but not...

A space telescope has captured our galaxy’s doppelganger. It lies 30 million light-years away. The brilliant object is a spiral galaxy dubbed GC 6744. And the European Space Agency’s Euclid craft — launched in 2023 and packing a high-resolution 1.2-meter (four-foot) wide telescope — snapped a new razor-sharp image of this star-filled galaxy. “This galaxy...

The skies can be clear, blue, and tranquil. “And all of a sudden, boom, you hit it,” Dan Bubb, a former airline pilot and now an aviation historian at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, told Mashable. This boom is “clear-air turbulence,” a well-known hazard to aircraft and the passengers aboard. It’s created by unstable...

Based on what scientists have said about Venus, finding a world similar to it may not seem like a thrilling breakthrough in space research: Our neighboring planet’s surface is a hot, toxic world, with sulfuric acid rain and volcanoes. But Venus might once have been an ocean world much like Earth before it devolved into...

Last week, Korean girl group aespa dropped a stellar new single, “Supernova,” that likened their fizzling intensity to that of an exploding star. As the music video for the tune racked up millions of views, NASA’s Webb Telescope jumped in to share an image of the youngest known remnant of a real-life supernova — the...

Everywhere you look are galaxies. The powerful James Webb Space Telescope recently captured a new deep field view of the universe, which is a look into some of the farthest reaches of space. In the image below, the hundreds of objects you can see (except for the six-pointed stars in the foreground) are galaxies among...

Most stars aren’t like the sun. Some 55 light-years away — which is relatively close by in space terms — scientists have discovered a rocky, Earth-sized world orbiting extremely close to its star (a single orbit, or “year,” lasts just 17 hours). The exoplanet, which receives much more solar radiation than Earth and is unlikely...

A complex mission to Mercury that began its epic space voyage six years ago has encountered critical thrust problems that controllers say could imperil plans to study the closest planet to the sun.  BepiColombo, a joint European and Japanese mission, is on its way to reach Mercury on Sept. 5 for the first of three...