1+ hour, 29+ min ago   (120+ words) We’ve been covering the journey of the Habitable Worlds Observatory for some time now. Over the past few years, it's gone from a proposal to a relatively fleshed-out plan for how and what the next Great Observatory should do—in…...

2+ day, 22+ hour ago   (173+ words) Instead, they would rely on robust, mass producible lasers firing longer pulses. Typically, they envision them being in the micro- to milli-second range, simply to keep data transfer at a reasonable pace across the light years. However, there is a…...

6+ day, 20+ hour ago   (116+ words) Astronomers have found four new white dwarfs within about 65 light years. Even though the sky has been studied thoroughly, these escaped detection. That's because they're tight binaries with red dwarf partners, and the much brighter red dwarfs hide the white…...

1+ week, 12+ hour ago   (184+ words) There is something quietly reassuring about a scientific mystery that gets solved not by a dramatic new discovery, but by simply looking again, more carefully, at something we thought we already understood. That’s exactly what has happened with the Sun,…...

1+ week, 3+ day ago   (123+ words) As far as we know, food doesn’t exist naturally in space. We have to bring it with us if we want to explore the final frontier. One of the oldest and most common types of food on planet Earth is…...

3+ week, 5+ day ago   (397+ words) Searching for habitable worlds beyond our solar system consists of more than just having it orbit within its star’s habitable zone, which is the region where temperatures could be just right for liquid water to exist on the surface. On…...

4+ week, 11+ hour ago   (712+ words) Astronomers have found two of the lightest worlds ever discovered, a pair of giant planets so wispy that, gram for gram, they are less dense than candy floss. Each is roughly the size of Jupiter yet holds almost nothing inside…...

4+ week, 11+ hour ago   (142+ words) What happens to a star after a black hole eats it? You might assume the answer is simple: a brief, brilliant flare as the star is torn apart, then silence as the black hole settles back into the dark. For…...

1+ mon, 1+ day ago   (360+ words) When Artemis II swept around the far side of the Moon this April, carrying the first humans beyond Earth orbit in more than fifty years, NASA had prepared its four astronauts for something more than flying the spacecraft. It had…...

1+ mon, 1+ day ago   (103+ words) The ESA's Euclid space telescope took 26 hours to capture this portrait of the Milky Way's central bulge. This isn't part of its primary mission; instead it's kind of like bonus science. It'll be used in the Roman Space Telescope's gravitational…...