The northern lights have been seen at high altitudes in North America and Europe, including Iceland, where this photo was taken in 2020. (Photo by Juan Maria Coy Vergara via Getty Images) A rare double solar eruption created a spectacular…
Illustration of an object causing a burst of energy near a supermassive black hole (Image credit: ESA) In December 2019, an ordinary galaxy located 300 million light-years away in the constellation Virgo suddenly “woke up.” After decades of dormancy, the…
JWST observations of what is believed to be the first documented case of a planet being swallowed up have shown that the star did not swell to swallow the planet, but rather its orbit gradually shrank over time, as illustrated…
The photos show that Comet SWAN brightened significantly from April 3 to 6 before fading again, indicating that some sort of outburst occurred. (Photo credit: Mike Olason) An emerald-green comet discovered earlier this month has just “exploded” as it continues…
The Northern Hemisphere’s first meteor shower of spring, the Lyrids, will peak on the night of April 21-22. This year, the annual meteor shower will be visible in a nearly moonless night sky, which promises to be a spectacular sight.…
On January 13, 2025, Mars was captured rising above the lunar surface using the Shreve telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory near Tucson, Arizona. (Image credit: KPNO Winsky & A. Sorensen / Image processing: J. Winsky & M. Zamani (NSF…
(Image credit: cokada via Getty Images) Dyson spheres, the theoretical megastructures that advanced alien civilizations could create to surround their star and extract its energy, have a serious flaw: they are highly unstable. But now an engineer claims to have…
Kessler syndrome ‘threatens our future in space’ unless proactive cleanup efforts are taken, according to a new report. (Image credit: janiecbros/Getty Images) The European Space Agency’s (ESA) latest State of the Space Environment report says that, if left unchecked, the…
SpinLaunch’s Meridian Space satellites will be stacked like pancakes on a ‘launch bus’ before being launched into space by a booster rocket. (Image credit: SpinLaunch) A California startup aims to launch hundreds of flattened “microsatellites” into low Earth orbit at…
The record-breaking early galaxy RUBIES-UDS-QG-z7 and its spectra observed with the JWST. (Image credit: NASA/CSA/ESA, A. Weibel, P. A. Oesch (University of Geneva), RUBIES team: A. de Graaf (MPIA Heidelberg), G. Brammer (Niels Bohr Institute), DAWN JWST Archive) Astronomers using…
New calculations suggest that a collision between young Mercury and a similarly sized protoplanet may have given it its unusual composition. (Image credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington) A recent study suggests that Mercury’s mysterious composition…
An image of the Small Magellanic Cloud taken by the Herschel Space Observatory. (Image Credit: Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images) Astronomers have found startling evidence that one of the galaxies near our own is being destroyed by…