The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has just headed into its second year in service, and recently recorded new images of the Ring Nebula named Messier 57. This nebula is about 2,600 light-years away from Earth, located in the Lyra ...

The early universe was a stressful place for galaxies. Globs of tens to hundreds of neighboring galaxies, called galaxy clusters, would share a communal pool of hot gas—but not without drama. There was always another wayward galaxy crashing into the cluster, ...

In 1989, Chuck Berry and Carl Sagan partied it up at one of the biggest bashes of the summer—a celebration honoring the two Voyager spacecrafts, who were about to make a dramatic exit from our solar system.  The twin probes, ...

A stellar new image from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) is offering up some clues about how planets as enormous as the gas giant Jupiter could form. Researchers used the ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) and an international astronomy facility ...

In space, no one can hear a probe smash into an asteroid—but that’s just what happened in September, when NASA’s successful DART experiment proved that it’s possible to reroute a space rock by crashing into it on purpose. And that ...

The three-decade old Hubble Space Telescope has spotted a swarm of space boulders around the asteroid Dimorphos. If that name sounds familiar, it is the same asteroid that NASA deliberately slammed the 1,200 pound DART spacecraft into in September 2022. ...

Our asteroid belt is home to more than a million space rocks, varying in size from a dwarf planet to dust particles, which float between Jupiter and Mars. Astronomers have just discovered another such belt—but this one circles a different ...

Researchers using Chile’s Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array of telescopes (ALMA) may have found a rare “sibling” sharing the same orbit of a Jupiter-like planet about 370 light-years away from Earth in the Centaurus constellation. The newly discovered twin shares the ...

The universe is a dusty place. Cosmic particles can range from the size of a single large molecule up to a bit larger than a grain of terrestrial sand, and these can accumulate in billowing clouds light-years wide. The general ...

In the series I Made a Big Mistake, PopSci explores mishaps and misunderstandings, in all their shame and glory. Astronomers can’t help but be enchanted with fast radio bursts, or FRBs, thanks to their mysterious nature. These humongous pulses of radio waves blast ...