Stars and planets are born inside swirling clouds of cosmic gas and dust that are brimming with hydrogen and other molecular ingredients. On Monday, astronomers revealed the discovery of the closest known cloud to Earth, a colossal, crescent-shaped blob of star-forming potential. Named Eos, after the Greek goddess of the dawn, the cloud was found…
Jonathan McDowell is a go-to expert for all things spaceflight. Thousands of subscribers read his monthly Space Report, and far more people have seen him on cable news and other media platforms explaining unexpected events in orbit. But that has always been his side gig: For 37 years, Dr. McDowell has been a specialist in…
From ancient star streams to the innards of white dwarfs, the Gaia space telescope has seen it all. On Thursday, mission specialists at the European Space Agency will send Gaia, which is low on fuel, into orbit around the sun, and switch it off after more than a decade of service to the world’s astronomers….
An international team of astronomers on Wednesday unveiled the most compelling evidence to date that dark energy — a mysterious phenomenon pushing our universe to expand ever faster — is not a constant force of nature but one that ebbs and flows through cosmic time. Dark energy, the new measurement suggests, may not resign our…
On the flanks of the largest active volcano on Earth, the Mauna Loa Observatory tracks the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that are warming the planet, and has been doing so since 1958. But the office in Hilo, Hawaii that manages the world-famous site could close in August, according to a copy of…
From Thursday night into Friday morning, the Earth’s shadow gradually overtook the moon’s typically bright white face, which took on a ruddy red hue. It was the first total lunar eclipse, also known as a blood moon, in more than two years. A lunar eclipse occurs when the sun, Earth and moon align, in that…
Two NASA missions finally launched from the California coast and soared toward the stars late Tuesday night, overcoming a week of delays to get to orbit. Both aim to unravel mysteries about the universe — one by peering far from Earth, the other by looking closer to home. The rocket’s chief passenger is SPHEREx, a…
Astronomers say they have discovered more than 100 new moons around Saturn, possibly the result of cosmic smashups that left debris in the planet’s orbit as recently as 100 million years ago. The gas giant planets of our solar system have many moons, which are defined as objects that orbit around planets or other bodies…
Two NASA missions are ready for a late-night launch aboard a single rocket. Both aim to unravel mysteries about the universe — one by peering far from Earth, the other by looking closer to home. The rocket’s chief passenger is SPHEREx, a space telescope that will take images of the entire sky in more than…
Astronomers have been carefully watching 2024 YR4, a space rock with a heightened chance of hitting Earth in 2032. But fear not: NASA announced on Monday that it posed a threat no longer — the odds that the asteroid would smash into our planet have dropped to nearly zero. “I knew this was likely to…