What could bears and space telescopes possibly have in common? Last month, both the Hubble Space Telescope and the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (known as TESS) ended up in a sort of hibernation. When faced with some kind of threat, ...

For the first time since November 2023, NASA is receiving meaningful communication from its Voyager 1 probe. The agency has spent months troubleshooting a glitch in why the famed probe was sending home messages that looked like garbled up gibberish ...

We’ve all seen beautiful images of outer space, with vivid swirls and bright stars resting on a black abyss. With how quick it is to snap a color photo on an iPhone, you might think that sophisticated space telescopes churn ...

In the new IMAX film Deep Sky, a protostar shines from the center of a dark cloud, the phantom galaxy swirls, and the dusty space clouds of the Cosmic Cliffs of Carina tower like mountain peaks. Also, scientists cry. The ...

Scientists have discovered an enormous stellar-mass black hole in our Milky Way galaxy that’s roughly 33 times more massive than our sun. This black hole designated as Gaia-BH3 was observed with the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Gaia space telescope and ...

Our solar system has a suite of eight planets—rocky Mars and Earth, the ice giants, and massive gas planets—but other stars often have a much smaller group. Some suns have just one exoplanet orbiting around them. These loner worlds are ...

High altitude balloons have drawn a lot of fire lately. In February, the US military shot down a spy balloon potentially operated by the Chinese government and an “unidentified aerial phenomenon” that was later revealed to likely be a hobbyist ...

Humans might fear the nuclear bomb, but it is not even a blip against what the cosmos can unleash. Take, for example, the gamma ray burst: a stark flash of light and radiation erupting from a colossal star in its ...

A team of more than 1,000 astronomers and college students just took a step closer to solving one of the long-lasting mysteries of astronomy: Why is the sun’s outer layer, known as the corona, so ridiculously hot? The solar surface ...

Gravitational wave observatories, such as the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), are exercises in extreme sensitivity. LIGO’s two experimental ears—one in Louisiana, another in Washington state—listen to ripples in space-time left behind by objects that include black holes and neutron ...