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This category presents the reader with astronomical events that can be seen each week, and month.
Mars can glow in ultraviolet light when energetic particles strike its upper atmosphere. The planet does not have Earth’s global magnetic field, so scientists have had to work out how…
Six days after a discarded Falcon 9 stage hit the Moon, NASA steered the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter toward the predicted impact site. Its images reveal an 18-metre crater, fresh material thrown from below the surface, and a remarkably accurate impact forecast.
Saturn’s rings look like a solid disk from Earth, but they are closer to a vast, flat swarm of orbiting particles. Most of the material is water ice mixed with…
Curiosity has photographed a broad field of polygonal fractures in a Martian valley, giving scientists another look at the water, sediment, and temperature changes that shaped the planet’s past.
A star does not switch off the instant its fuel runs low. The change begins in the core, where nuclear reactions have supported the star against gravity for most of…
Spacecraft near the Moon cannot simply open a map app and ask where they are. For decades, missions have relied on ground stations to measure their position, calculate a trajectory…
Planets are far dimmer than the stars they orbit, so taking a normal photograph of an Earth-sized world next to a Sun-like star is extraordinarily difficult. Astronomers usually find exoplanets…
What happens to Webb’s mysterious little red dots as the universe ages? The Saguaro galaxy’s red nucleus offers a way to explore their hidden surroundings.
The Moon does have an atmosphere, but calling it air would be misleading. Its outer envelope is an exosphere: a scatter of atoms so thin that particles can travel long…
Spiral galaxies are often drawn as graceful pinwheels, with arms that curl around a bright centre in something close to balance. NGC 4654 is a one-sided spiral galaxy that does…
What is MoM-BH*-1? Webb’s spectrum suggests a possible black hole star wrapped in dense gas at cosmic dawn. Here is what the evidence shows—and what remains uncertain.
When you look at the Moon, you see it as it was about 1.3 seconds ago. The delay is too short to notice, but the principle is the same for…
Betelgeuse has been watched for thousands of years, but the red star still had one secret that refused to give itself up. Astronomers had long suspected that a fainter companion…
The centre of the Milky Way is a difficult place for fragile molecules. Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the heart of our galaxy, is surrounded by intense radiation,…
Most comets and asteroids that pass through the Solar System are permanent residents. The Sun’s gravity keeps them on closed orbits, even when those orbits take thousands of years to…
The Milky Way is not the center of the universe. No observation has placed Earth or our galaxy in a privileged position, and the large-scale universe looks broadly the same…
Euclid has found 31 quasars from the universe’s first 700 million years, giving astronomers a new way to study how early supermassive black holes grew.
Sending a spacecraft between stars is difficult for a reason that is easy to underestimate: the spacecraft has to leave one planetary system and arrive at another with enough speed,…
Look up on a clear night and the sky between the stars is mostly black. That seems obvious until you ask a deceptively simple question: if the universe contains an…
The Kuiper Belt is a broad, cold region beyond Neptune where millions of icy bodies orbit the Sun. Pluto is the best-known member, but it is only one of many…
Vacuum birefringence sounds like a contradiction. A vacuum is supposed to be empty, while birefringence is a property associated with materials such as crystals. In quantum physics, however, empty space…
The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument has completed the observing campaign that was designed to map the large-scale structure of the universe. The survey has recorded spectra for more than 47…
When a star like the Sun reaches the end of its life, it does not simply switch off. It can spend thousands of years pushing its outer atmosphere into space,…
The Lion Nebula looks like a face because a dying star has spent thousands of years shaping the material around it. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has now photographed the…