Space

Jun 22nd, 2025 - QUICK FACTS What it is: The Chamaeleon I star-forming cloud Where it is: 522 light-years away, in the constellations Chamaeleon, Apus, Musca, Carina and Octans When it was shared: June 10, 2025 Stars form within dark molecular clouds of gas and dust called nebulae, but it's rare to capture these stellar nurseries clearly. A dramatic new image from the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) in Chile unveils the Chamaeleon I dark cloud — the closest such place to the solar system — in ... [Read More]

Jun 21st, 2025 - Venus has long carried the nickname "Earth's twin," yet most people picture it as a static, oven‑hot wasteland with a geologically dead surface. A fresh look at radar and gravity records from NASA's Magellan orbiter now shows the planet is still shifting and rumbling in real time, rewriting that bleak image. Study lead Gael Cascioli of the University of Maryland in Baltimore County and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center says his team's work has provided a new and important insight ... [Read More]

Jun 21st, 2025 - Engineers switched to a backup fuel line less than a quarter of the way through Psyche's mission. A NASA spacecraft bound for an unexplored metal-rich asteroid has reignited its plasma thrusters, continuing its cruise deeper into the Solar System after switching to a backup fuel line. The $1.4 billion Psyche mission, built to explore an asteroid with the same name, has four electric thrusters fueled by xenon gas. Psyche's solar electric propulsion system is more fuel efficient than conventional ... [Read More]

Jun 21st, 2025 - Astronomers have obtained a stunning new image of the Sculptor Galaxy, painted in thousands of colors that reveals the intricacies of galactic systems. The incredible image of the galaxy — located around 11 million light-years away and also known as NGC 253 — was collected with the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) instrument of the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile. In addition to providing a galaxy-wide view of the Sculptor Galaxy, the image shows intricate details of NGC ... [Read More]

Jun 21st, 2025 - On a mountaintop at the edge of the Atacama Desert in Chile, the world's newest telescope is poised to begin a revolutionary survey of the southern hemisphere's observable universe, one that promises to see more galaxies than ever seen before as well as millions of previously unidentified asteroids roaming our solar system. The first batch of test images from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory is scheduled to be released Monday at 11:30 a.m., followed by a news conference at the National Academy of ... [Read More]

Jun 21st, 2025 - Total solar eclipses are rare, but exactly how rare is now up for debate after the European Space Agency debuted the first images today (June 16) from two new satellites that together operate as an "eclipse machine." Total solar eclipses currently occur 14 times every 18 years and 11 days somewhere on Earth, which is one every 16 months, on average. According to NASA , they occur once every 366 years in any specific place. Requiring neither lucky geography nor patience, the European Space ... [Read More]

Jun 21st, 2025 - W hat do the clouds on Jupiter, dust storms on Mars and rainstorms on Titan all have in common? They look like they belong on Earth. As we venture through the universe, scientists are finding uncanny - and sometimes unexpected - hints of Earth on other planets and moons. Clouds on Jupiter swirl like ocean eddies on Earth, and dust storms that act like hurricanes can inundate Mars. Even though these celestial bodies can be hundreds of million miles away from us, the same laws of physics apply, ... [Read More]

Jun 20th, 2025 - Sign up for CNN's Wonder Theory science newsletter.  . Scientists are trying to solve a decade-long mystery by determining the identity of anomalous signals detected from below ice in Antarctica. The strange radio waves emerged during a search for another unusual phenomenon: high-energy cosmic particles known as neutrinos. Arriving at Earth from the far reaches of the cosmos, neutrinos are often called "ghostly" because they are extremely volatile, or vaporous, and can go through any kind ... [Read More]

Jun 20th, 2025 - You can't see it, yet it tugs on every star in the sky. Astronomers call this hidden glue dark matter, and for nearly a century they have struggled to learn what it is and how it shapes the Milky Way. The newest clue comes from a Hollywood‑scale digital stunt double of our own galaxy called the COZMIC suite. Led by USC cosmologist Vera Gluscevic , the project runs on a supercomputer that rewinds cosmic history and plays it back under different laws of physics. COZMIC clones of the Milky ... [Read More]

Jun 20th, 2025 - Sky This Week is brought to you in part by Celestron. Friday, June 20 The summer solstice occurs at this evening at 10:42 P.M. EDT. For those in the Northern Hemisphere, this marks the official beginning of the summer season. (For those south of the equator, of course, this is the winter solstice and marks the official beginning of winter.)  On this date, the Sun appears to sit directly above Earth's Tropic of Cancer, which marks 23.5° latitude north. Also on the summer solstice, our ... [Read More]

Jun 20th, 2025 - Astronomers have spotted a giant exoplanet, named TOI-6894b, that's bigger than Saturn and circling a red dwarf star only one-fifth the mass of the Sun. This finding rewrites expectations about where massive planets can form and hints that such worlds may be common around the smallest stars. The discovery emerged from a survey of Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite ( TESS ) data. Tiny star hosts a giant TOI-6894b TOI-6894 is a cool red dwarf that shines with far less light than the Sun. Yet ... [Read More]

Jun 20th, 2025 - NASA's Mars Odyssey captures a surreal new image of Arsia Mons at sunrise Just before dawn on May 2, a camera 240 million kilometers from Earth caught a moment that seemed almost Earth-like: clouds hugging the flanks of a great mountain, and a summit poking defiantly above them. But this had nothing to do with Earth. The mountain was Arsia Mons—one of the tallest volcanoes in the solar system—seen from orbit around Mars. The image, captured by NASA 's Mars Odyssey orbiter, is the ... [Read More]

Jun 19th, 2025 - A "new star" is shining in the constellation Lupus thanks to an unexpected stellar explosion within the Milky Way — and it can currently be seen with the naked eye from parts of North America. On June 12, astronomers from the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae at Ohio State University first spotted the new point of light, which had an apparent magnitude of +8.7 at the time, still too dim to be seen by the naked eye, Sky & Telescope originally reported . (A smaller magnitude signifies ... [Read More]

Jun 19th, 2025 - NASA's Perseverance rover has rolled across a bright carpet of dust and bedrock for more than four years, but few sights have stopped the team in its tracks quite like a charcoal‑colored boulder perched on Witch Hazel Hill. The oddity , dubbed "Skull Hill," sits alone against tan sandstone, pocked with shallow pits and angled facets. The rover first photographed the stone on April 11 while crossing a contact where light and dark units meet along the rim of Jezero Crater. ... [Read More]

Jun 19th, 2025 - By This observatory has probably been the most transformative astronomy project of the 21st century, but there's a good chance you've never heard of it. Just last week, for instance, the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York City debuted a new "space show" called Encounters in the Milky Way —and this often overlooked spacecraft is its scientific superstar. But you're more likely to know about actor Pedro Pascal's narration in the show than you are ... [Read More]

Jun 18th, 2025 - The universe is filled with galaxies, and many really faint galaxies are interesting objects from an astrophysical point of view, but they offer backyard observers with amateur telescopes quite a challenge. Such an object is UGC 10214, the so-called Tadpole Galaxy in Draco. This barred spiral has a long tidal tail of material streaming off one of its ends, thus the reason for the nickname. It is a heavily disrupted barred spiral, and the tidal tail, which stretches 280,000 light-years long, ... [Read More]