All SPACE OUT Articles

Sure, the sun looks all calm up there in the sky. Kids even put little smiley faces on the sun when they draw it. But look closer and you’ll find that our sun has a nasty, violent temper.

We’ve all heard the story of the first Thanksgiving, but this meal – and life itself, if we’re being honest – wouldn’t be possible without the elements themselves. And those elements took a long journey to end up on your dinner plate.

Folks, we just found a 500-lightyear-wide hole in our galaxy. Fess up: which one of you did it?

Excited by the prospects of the “UFO Report”? As a scientist, I have my doubts. But you can watch UFOS DECLASSIFED: LIVE on Discovery and Science June 30 at 8P where experts discuss what can and can't be explained.

How does Santa make it to all the children in the world in one night? Can flying reindeer travel at the speed of light?Dive into the physics behind this Christmas tale.

From the exotic to the just plain odd, our solar system is home to some of the most extreme worlds in the galaxy. But I’m not talking about the planets, I’m talking about their moons. Let’s take a look at the most strange...

Long ago, our universe was without stars. When that first generation ignited, it completely transformed the cosmos, ripping away the veil of neutral gas that had persisted for hundreds of millions of years. This process, called reionization, is largely mysterious to astronomers. But new research is revealing that the smallest of galaxies may have played the biggest of roles.

I’m going to start this off by telling you that we’re not sure if cosmic strings exist.But if they did, it would be awesome.

Jupiter is all sorts of wild.

One of my favorite things about exoplanet systems is just how weird they can get. It seems that every few months we are treated to another surprise. This time around, NASA's TESS observatory delivered a planet almost three times more massive than Jupiter orbiting around not one, but two stars. As an added bonus: that planet orbits its twin suns closer than the Earth does around the sun. Who wants to take a trip?

There aren’t a lot of telescopes that are also movie stars. In fact, I can think of only one: the famed Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico.

Meet TYC 7037-89-1, a six-star solar system. Astrophysicist Paul M. Sutter explains this stellar surprise discovery.

Listen folks, I love a good sci-fi movie as much as anyone. Cruising around the galaxy, finding weird stuff, and blowing up aliens--it’s all good. But just because a writer can come up with something, it doesn’t make it possible. I’m sorry to say that we’re going to be bound to our solar system for a really, really long time. As in, probably forever.

Finally! It was initially proposed way back in 1998 and named the James Webb Space Telescope in 2002. After a decade of delays and over 10 billion dollars past its original budget, NASA’s next great observatory finally launched from the European Space Agency’s Guiana Space Centre in South America.

Space is a busy place, with a lot of things going up (most of the time) and coming down (when we want them to). Let’s check in on the latest orbital happenings.