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This category presents the reader with astronomical events that can be seen each week, and month.
A fragment of meteorite has preserved a magnetic snapshot from the first days of the Solar System. By studying microscopic dust inside the meteorite, researchers estimate that the disk around…
Why do planets orbit the Sun instead of falling into it? The short answer is that gravity pulls the planets inward while their sideways motion carries them forward. The combination…
Astronomers have detected the highest-energy gamma rays ever recorded from a blazar at this distance. The source, OP 313, is an active galaxy whose central black hole is feeding on…
What is a supernova? It is a stellar explosion powerful enough to briefly outshine an entire galaxy. Some supernovae mark the collapse of massive stars. Others happen when a dense…
JWST observations reveal uneven water-ice and carbon-dioxide patterns across Callisto, including a striking difference between its leading and trailing hemispheres.
How do astronomers know an exoplanet has an atmosphere? They usually do not see the atmosphere as a separate blue shell. Instead, they measure the way the planet changes the…
Comets are usually introduced through their tails, but a recent Subaru Telescope observation captured one without the cloud that gives a comet its familiar appearance. Comet 28P/Neujmin was more than…
Physicists have observed the tiny, random fluctuations expected in a quantum field by building a version of the field in the laboratory. The experiment did not photograph literal empty space.…
Planets are assembled inside broad disks of gas and dust around young stars, but those disks do not last forever. A new James Webb Space Telescope survey shows that winds…
NASA’s Curiosity rover has climbed roughly a kilometre up Mount Sharp, the 5-kilometre-high mountain rising from the floor of Gale Crater. The milestone is more than a distance record. Each…
How does a gravity assist send a spacecraft farther into the Solar System? The spacecraft flies close to a moving planet or moon and uses the body’s gravity to bend…
Most exoplanets are found indirectly. Astronomers watch a star dim when a planet crosses its face, or measure the tiny wobble caused by the planet’s gravity. The Nancy Grace Roman…
Enceladus’ south pole is cut by four long fractures that spray water vapour and ice into space. Scientists call them the “tiger stripes,” and a new model suggests that waves…
Mars looks cold from orbit, but a new study suggests that the rock beneath its south polar region may still be carrying a surprising amount of heat. By analysing tiny…
A supersonic aircraft does not need to be silent to change aviation. It needs to be quiet enough that people on the ground do not experience every overflight as a…
Why does Earth have a magnetic field? The answer begins more than 2,000 kilometres below our feet, in a layer of liquid iron and nickel that is constantly moving. Heat…
A meteorite fall does not end when a bright streak crosses the sky. New analysis of 75 documented falls follows the object through melting, fragmentation, braking, and the formation of a narrow strewn field.
A 17-spacecraft study found that a coronal mass ejection had a hotter, thinner component that Earth-based monitoring did not see directly.
Earth’s shadow will cover about 93 percent of the full Moon during the 27–28 August 2026 deep partial eclipse. It will be visible from the Americas, Europe, Africa, and western Asia.
TIC 433545934 contains two pairs of stars locked in a wider orbit. The pairs eclipse internally, and observations also caught one binary crossing the other—a rare geometry that lets astronomers measure four stars together.
NASA’s Curiosity rover has climbed onto a feature in Gale Crater that may mark a pause—and a change—in the story written by Martian rocks. The mission team calls it a…
How do telescopes measure the motion of distant galaxies? They read the fingerprints of atoms in the light those galaxies emit. A photograph can show a spiral, a cluster or…
The Moon is not motionless. It spins once on its axis in about 27.3 days and completes one orbit around Earth in about 27.3 days. Because those periods match, the…
The Tarantula Nebula is one of the busiest stellar nurseries in our galactic neighbourhood. Thousands of young stars are packed into a web of gas and dust in the Large…