Close encounters with our future selves? Unidentified flying objects (UFOs) have captured the public’s attention over the decades. As exoplanet detection is on the rise, why not consider that star-hopping visitors from afar might be buzzing through our friendly skies…
This illustration shows the six strange objects (dubbed G1 through G6) that astronomers detected swirling around our galaxy’s central black hole. The mysterious blobs orbit the hole every 100 to 1,000 years, stretching out as they approach. Like most large…
A planetary system hiding out in the constellation Dorado, some 100 light-years from Earth, hosts an Earth-size planet orbiting within its star’s habitable zone. A few months ago, a group of NASA exoplanet astronomers, who are in the business of…
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Artist’s rendition of a binary neutron star merger. HONOLULU — For the second time ever, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) has spotted two ultradense stellar remnants known as neutron stars violently crashing together. The gravitational wave event seems to have…
If we discovered evidence of alien life, would we even realize it? Life on other planets could be so different from what we’re used to that we might not recognize any biological signatures that it produces. Recent years have seen…
The world of the teensy-tiny, the quantum realm, could have a favorite flavor. We’re not talking about itty-bitty ice cream cones, of course. The world of particles is split into three camps, called “flavors” (don’t ask why). For example, the…
No one really knows what happens inside an atom. But two competing groups of scientists think they’ve figured it out. And both are racing to prove that their own vision is correct. Here’s what we know for sure: Electrons whiz…
This animation shows how a black hole bends nearby light depending on the angle at which it is viewed. As the 2010s come to a close, it’s time to revisit how some of the biggest space science stories shaped the…
A Russian Soyuz rocket carried two NASA astronauts, Nick Hague and Christina Koch, and cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin, toward the International Space Station on March 14, 2019. Three lunar missions, commercial spaceflight milestones, the first all-woman spacewalk — 2019 was a…
The brain tells us what to do, how to act, what to think and what to say. It even remembers the face of strangers on the street and wraps them up in our worries, plops a party hat on them…
Mysterious fast radio bursts (FRBs) dazzle through the sky. Space dominated the headlines in 2019 with stories documenting the first successful image of a black hole, or how a crashed Israeli spacecraft spilled thousands of tardigrades onto the moon. But…