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Back in October, the announcement that the first interstellar asteroid…

The cosmic web — the distribution of matter on the…

This orange blob is the nearby star Betelgeuse, as imaged…

ift.tt/2evx1Df Astronomers have mapped atomic neutral hydrogen across the entire…

ift.tt/2dffJJG Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each…

ift.tt/2cxgDAX The European Space Agency (ESA) has released the largest,…

ift.tt/29EH4Tw For thousand of years, astronomers and astrologers believed that the Earth was at the center of our Universe. This perception was due in part to the fact that Earth-based observations were complicated by the fact that the Earth is…

ift.tt/2a28BwN According to new research by astrophysicists at the University of Kansas, Earth’s early biology was tested repeatedly by fierce gusts of cosmic wind originating from twin supernovae some 300 million light-years from Earth. For weeks, the night sky may…

ift.tt/29kOuNc Brown dwarfs – those not-quite-a-planet and not-quite-a-star objects – are intriguing oddities that are too low in mass to burn hydrogen, but are more massive than planets. They only emit a faint amount of light, so they are hard…

ift.tt/29CTVXm The splendor of the cosmos in a trailblazing marriage of art and science more than a century before modern astrophotography. “I sometimes ask myself whether I would be studying galaxies if they were ugly,” pioneering astronomer Vera Rubin observed…

ift.tt/29A8IBZ In the famous scene from the Star Wars movie “A New Hope” we recall young Luke Skywalker contemplating his future in the light of a binary sunset on the planet Tatooine. Not so many years later in 2011, astronomers using…

Why, and how, you should sketch your observations through a telescope. A sketch of the Perseus Double Cluster, NGC 884 and NGC 869. D. Rennie In the late-1990s, I wrote an essay for a literary journal and cited two quotes:…

Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2016 June 19 Galaxy and Planets Beyond Bristlecone Pines…

Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2016 June 21 NGC 6814: Grand Design Spiral Galaxy…

The second detection of gravitational waves by the LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) instruments reminds us how much we gain when we move beyond the visible light observations that for so many millennia determined what people thought of the universe.…

What’s going on in the center of this spiral galaxy?…