Space

The end of the universe as we know it will not come with a bang. Most stars will slowly fizzle as their temperatures fade to zero.

While British astronaut Tim Peake was on board at the International Space Station in 2015 and 2016, he supported a project involving a pack of “rocket lettuce” (arugula) seeds, snapping multiple pictures during the seeds’ six months in space. Students across the United Kingdom then grew those seeds back on […]

The iconic Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico has gone dark, at least for a little while.

Video courtesy of Slooh. Visit Slooh.com to snap and share your own photos from this live event, and interact with our hosts and guests, and personally control Slooh’s telescopes.

Using the Chandra and XMM-Newton spacecraft, astronomers from the Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center in Warsaw, Poland, have investigated an ultraluminous X-ray source (ULX) in the galaxy NGC 5055. The study, detailed in a paper published August 5 on the arXiv preprint server, provides more insight into the properties of this […]

An American astronaut joins an international crew for a long-duration spaceflight and has to endure both the challenges of the mission and the effects of being separated from Earth.

NASA will discontinue the use of certain nicknames for astronomical objects that are considered to be racist, the space agency said Aug. 5. 

Vast areas of the Martian night sky pulse in ultraviolet light, according to images from NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft. The results are being used to illuminate complex circulation patterns in the Martian atmosphere.

The question of how small, dwarf galaxies have sustained the formation of new stars over the course of the Universe has long confounded the world’s astronomers. Now, an international research team has found that dormant small galaxies can slowly accumulate gas over many billions of years. When this gas suddenly […]

Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), in which the European Southern Observatory (ESO) is a partner, have revealed an extremely distant and therefore very young galaxy that looks surprisingly like our Milky Way. The galaxy is so far away its light has taken more than 12 billion years […]