All SPACE OUT Articles

Welcome to the era of precision cosmology…where we’ve managed to very precisely measure everything we don't know about the universe.

Ready for an exotic vacation? How about…really exotic? Tired of tropical beaches or snow-covered mountains? Let’s go…out of this world.

Space hotels may be in our future.

That was worth the wait. Just a quick handful of months since its historic launch on Christmas Day, the James Webb Space Telescope has flown to its observing position, unfolded its delicate instruments and ultra-sized mirror, and run through a suite of checks and alignments and calibrations. The team at NASA behind the telescopes released their first batch of images from the science runs, and besides being gorgeous, they're powerful.

A long time ago, our universe was dark.It was just 380,000 years after the big bang. Up until that age, our entire observable cosmos was less than a millionth of its present size. All the material in the universe was compressed into that tiny volume, forcing it to heat up and become a plasma. But as the universe expanded and cooled, eventually the plasma changed into a neutral gas as the first atoms formed.

What if there was another you, somewhere out there, doing all the things you wished you could’ve done? What if there was a multiverse, where all the possibilities and choices of our lives became real? It seems like just another fantasy of science fiction, but it’s closer to reality than you might think.

You know that feeling--They close their eyes, purse their lips, and lean in. So you go for it. You feel the spark, the magic, and the fire of that first kiss. It’s one of the best things in the Universe.Except, of course, if you’re a star.

In 2002, NASA’s orbiting X-ray observatory, the Chandra telescope, mapped out the movements of hot gas in a cluster of galaxies sitting 250 million light-years away.

Black holes are tricky creatures. Since ancient times the practice of astronomy has been to point our eyes and instruments at all the glowing things in the skies above us. But black holes are defined by the fact that nothing, not even light, can escape their gravitational clutches. So how you do see something that is completely, totally black?

2021 was a pretty exciting year for spaceflight. We had a bunch of private rocket launches and the initiation of a new era in space tourism. We had the launch of DART, a mission where NASA will use a spacecraft to punch an asteroid in the face. And at the last moment, we had liftoff for the much-delayed and long-awaited James Webb Space Telescope.

Let’s say you’re an astronomer (work with me here) and you want to take a picture of something incredibly, deeply far away. You know, the typical business of astronomy.

There’s more to NASA than space. The agency’s full acronym stands for National Aeronautics and Space Administration. I’ve covered plenty of interesting stories in the space sector, so it’s time to the aeronautics side some love too.

It’s a tough game to determine if a distant planet orbiting some nameless star hosts life on it or not. You can’t just walk up to it and start flipping over rocks or poking into the dirt. You can only use your telescopes, and the planets are so extremely distant that you can’t see the surface itself.

Even though NASA’s latest flagship instrument, the James Webb Space Telescope, is touted as the successor to the venerable Hubble, it has one major difference.

The European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter reached the halfway point between the Earth and the Sun to snap an amazing super-high-res picture. You can zoom in on the image to reveal the stunning details of the Sun’s surface. It’s like a Google Earth…but for the Sun.