Mars’ moons are easily visible at night from the Red Planet. Larger Phobos is brighter, while smaller Deimos is still brighter than any star.

Through the early 1900s, astronomers disagreed on whether the universe was home to a multitude of galaxies, so-called “island universes,” or contained entirely within the boundaries of the Milky Way ...

Jupiter reaches its best apparition in a decade for northern observers and offers a wealth of detail. Joining in late evening is brilliant Mars, now a month from opposition. Saturn is visible in the ...

A study led by SETI Institute scientist Matija Ćuk proposes that Saturn’s bright rings and its largest moon, Titan, may have both originated in collisions among its moons. This study was accepted for ...

Recent months have featured a few stories about how Albert Einstein’s theories, or the ideas underpinning them, have all been confirmed to a new degree of accuracy. That’s usually the case: Scientists ...

Asteroid 44 Nysa may be just past opposition, but it’s still placed perfectly for evening viewing in Cancer the Crab. Wait until a few hours after sunset, when Cancer is high in the eastern sky, and ...

The first mission in NASA’s Living With a Star program, a slate of projects focused around understanding solar variability, the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) launched Feb. 11, 2010. The spacecraft ...

In less time than it takes to snap your fingers, the universe flashed into existence. Cosmogenesis is the breathtaking story of how this happened. It includes, in its later moments, the creation of ...

A series of powerful observations has made it clear that our universe has expanded for billions of years, emerging from the hot, dense state we call the Big Bang. Over the past several decades, new ...

The long nights of December are an astronomical delight. The early evening sky hosts Saturn as the main feature, along with Uranus and Neptune. Jupiter rises later and is visible all night, its four ...

The Moon has always beckoned. Long before our ancestors realized “wandering stars” were actually planets sharing the solar system with Earth, they recognized the Moon was a sort of sibling to our ...

Earth’s Northern Hemisphere was covered in enormous Ice Age glaciers when a group of hunter-gatherers in southern Turkey began constructing the world’s first known temple. The site, called Gobekli ...