Science

Pluto is the most famous dwarf planet, due in part to its very public demotion from ninth planet of the solar system two decades ago.  But a relatively obscure dwarf planet in the main asteroid belt could be the most accessible icy world to Earthlings in space. Though it’s less than 600 miles wide, Ceres...

The James Webb Space Telescope‘s latest psychedelic view reveals an exploded star. But this supernova is special. That’s because, from our perch in the galaxy, the new stellar blast appears three times in a warped line — like it’s floating in front of a funhouse mirror. This distorting effect happens because objects in space can...

Scientists say they’ve finally found a world orbiting Barnard’s star, the closest single star to the sun. This rocky planet, discovered with the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile, is smaller than Earth, and flies around its tiny cool star every three days. Barnard’s star is six light-years away from us, in the...

An icy visitor is flying through the inner solar system. Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS, also called Comet C/2023 A3, has grown brighter as it’s approached the sun, allowing astronauts aboard the International Space Station to capture vivid footage of this ancient ball of ice, rock, and dust. NASA astronaut Matthew Dominick recently posted a view of the...

The M87 galaxy is monstrous. It contains several trillions of stars, compared to our Milky Way‘s hundreds of billions. And the supermassive black hole at its center is shooting an outstretched beam of energy into space. The Hubble Space Telescope, operated by NASA and the European Space Agency, has captured a new image of this...

The brains of NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft are stored in a metal vault. It’s where the large exploration vehicle — the length of a basketball court — safeguards its computers, software, and many electronics. The craft is about to launch to Jupiter’s moon Europa, a world planetary scientists suspect harbors an ocean twice the volume...

Our descendants will — at some time in the future — almost certainly need to deflect an asteroid. Though there is no known threat for at least the next century, planetary defense experts are investigating how to divert such a large space rock, and one proposal involves detonating a nuclear device near the menacing object....

Hurricane Helene spawned tempestuous seas. A collaboration between the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and Saildrone, the company that builds innovative sailing drones, sent a robust robot into Hurricane Helene, the major hurricane that made landfall in Florida’s Big Bend region on Thursday night. Before hitting land with catastrophic storm surge and extreme...

Unlike giant stars that explode into a supernova and collapse into a black hole, a medium star like Earth’s sun just keeps on trucking until it runs out of nuclear fuel, suffering a more prolonged death.  As a sun-like star nears the end of its life, it expands into a red giant, about 100 to...

Hurricane Helene is strengthening as expected, and landfall will occur on the Big Bend coast of Florida Thursday night. Traffic, however, will not wait for landfall to occur. Tweet may have been deleted During a major hurricane, road conditions can be affected not just by flooding and crashes, but by road damage, precautionary closures, or...