All Space Articles

Nearly a month after the James Webb Space Telescope launched from French Guiana on December 25, the telescope has reached its final destination–almost a million miles from Earth.

The European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecraft has managed to watch stars tremble, their light subtly changing as starquakes ripple through their surfaces. Which is pretty cool, because Gaia wasn’t even designed to do it.

Ten years ago scientists at the Large Hadron Collider had finally found evidence for the elusive Higgs boson, a particle that plays a central role in physics. And since then…we haven’t found much.

Sometimes you just know. Something clicks, you have a realization that this relationship isn’t right, and it’s simply time to go. It can happen to anyone, at any time, even to planets, and even billions of years ago.

On Wednesday, NASA announced the Hubble telescope broke a new record– detecting the most distant star ever seen.

Einstein was the first to explain the force of gravity as warps and dents in the fabric of spacetime. He was also the first to realize that those warps and dents can make waves – literal waves of gravity. But he didn’t think we would ever get to measure them, because they would be so tiny.

Let’s say one day astronomers announce that our worst nightmare has come true: a large object is headed towards the Earth with a significant chance of impact. What do we do?

You all have that person in your life. One minute they have you in stitches. The next they’re driving you nuts. You want to let go of this person but you just can’t…and the next day, you wish you never had the thought.You’re not alone, and what happens at the human level also happens at the cosmic level.

Beyond the most distant star you can see with the naked eye, beyond the most extreme faint galaxy that we discern with our telescopes, lays something extraordinary: the leftover light from the big bang itself.

To date, we know of over 5,000 planets outside the solar system. And astronomers suspect that there may be *checks notes* around a trillion more in our galaxy alone. The search for exoplanets is one of the hottest topics in astronomy, with expensive telescopes and giant collaborations all searching for the holy grail of the 21st century: an Earth 2.0, a habitable world like our own.

NASA sent a spacecraft on a mission to crash into an asteroid, so how did it go?Updated 9/26/22

Recently NASA’s DART mission succeeded in its primary goal, which was to slam a spacecraft face-first into an asteroid. For science. The intention of the mission was to test if we could actually redirect an asteroid and send it into a different orbit. But how and when will we know if it worked?

For the first time, a colorized image of the supermassive black hole located at the center of our own Milky Way Galaxy was shared by astronomers.

There are pulsars, and then there are binary pulsars, and then there are black widow pulsars. Because why can’t nature just stop?

Astronauts on long-term space missions can experience bone loss equivalent to two decades of aging. New research suggests more weight-bearing exercises in space could help offset that decline.