All Space Articles

The Milky Way is a giant, sprawling, beautiful spiral galaxy. It's also your home. Let's take a little tour.

Something happens once you see the world from a different perspective. It's called the "Overview Effect". But what does that mean?

ID2299, a galaxy 13.8 billion light years away, died far too young.

On a typical muggy midwestern August evening in 1977, astronomers at the Ohio State University’s Big Ear radio telescope got a big surprise. It was a signal so loud that it could only be described with one word: “wow!”

The eyes of much of the world have been looking up this week, gazing at Jupiter and Saturn as they dance tantalizingly close to each other.Many in the media and elsewhere have dubbed this planetary pair “the Christmas Star”, in reference to an oft-cited possible connection between the Bible’s Star of Bethlehem and such planetary “conjunctions” as Jupiter and Saturn are now displaying.

Headline after headline is sharing the exciting news: a pair of theoretical physicists have realized that our sci-fi dreams may be real: it may be possible to build an actual, operational warp drive. One problem: it doesn’t go all that fast.

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.

Space hotels may be in our future.

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

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.

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

Small stars can pack a surprisingly powerful punch. For an example look no further than the nearest neighbor to our solar system, Proxima Centauri. This little red dwarf just sent off a blast a hundred times more powerful than anything that our own sun ever has.

It was all supposed to be great. On January 16th, NASA performed its first major test run in a long, long time. It was a test for the core stage of its upcoming Space Launch System (SLS), a beast of a rocket that will carry astronauts to the Moon, Mars, and more.

After a truly legendary life, NASA astronaut Michael Collins passed away at the age of 90. Michael was a vital member of the Apollo 11 mission to the moon in 1969 and a pioneer of space exploration.