The Sun, along with more than 1,500 other stars, journeyed from the middle of the Milky Way to its current position a few billion years ago.

You can credit Earth’s atmosphere with providing an orangish color to the Moon during an eclipse. The atmosphere acts like a filtered lens. It bends red sunlight into our planet’s shadow and scatters ...

The phenomenon of a Full Moon arises when our planet, Earth, is precisely sandwiched between the Sun and the Moon. This alignment ensures the entire side of the Moon that faces us gleams under ...

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 ...

Mercury, Venus, and Saturn put on an early-evening display in the west, while Jupiter dominates the rest of the night. Jupiter features many events involving its four major moons that are well worth ...

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 ...

1I/2017 U1 (‘Oumuamua) was discovered in October 2017; shortly after, it was determined to be the first object ever seen inside the solar system that had come from beyond it. But by the time its ...

Karen Meech doesn’t spend a lot of time digging through Earth’s rocks. An astronomer by trade, she is usually behind the telescope, investigating comets and looking for hints about how Earth got its ...

In 2018, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission reached asteroid 101955 Bennu. Two years later, the spacecraft snagged a sample of its surface, which has since been returned to Earth. Now, astronomers are getting ...

Two-thirds of our stellar neighbors are cool M-class dwarf stars. The remaining third is a mixture of white dwarfs; type K, G, F, and A main sequence stars; and a handful of T- and L-class brown ...

For thousands of years, ancient societies all around the world erected massive stone circles, aligning them with the Sun and stars to mark the seasons. These early calendars foretold the coming of ...

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 ...