As black holes feed, they pull material into a disk around them. The material orbiting in this disk gets heated to extreme temperatures, and so it becomes a plasma — a state of matter in which some of ...

Mercury reaches its greatest western elongation 19° from the Sun at 6 A.M. EDT. Now shining a bright magnitude 0, it stands 5° high in the east an hour before sunrise. The planet is now some 42 ...

Saturn reaches opposition at 2 A.M. EDT, visible all night and offering stunning views of its rings and moons. The ringed planet now rises around sunset and is highest around local midnight, when it ...

What would you do if you woke up on a spaceship light-years from Earth without knowing why you’re there? Project Hail Mary opens in theaters March 20. Ahead of the film’s release, Astronomy spoke with ...

Born March 21, 1866, in New York, Antonia Maury was born into a family with an astronomical legacy: Her grandfather, John William Draper, was the second person to photograph the Moon (and the first ...

This is the ideal night to run the 2026 Messier marathon. This annual event challenges observers to view every object in Charles Messier’s catalog in a single night, from sundown to sunup. According ...

A team of scientists has confirmed that the nearby star GJ 887 hosts at least four planets, one of which could be a habitable world — the second closest to our own solar system. RELATED: Animal life ...

The simple answer is that Saturn’s rings do cast shadows on the planet’s surface! NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, which orbited Saturn from 2004 to 2017, took the dramatic image of the rings’ shadows on ...

NASA’s Van Allen Probe A re-entered Earth’s atmosphere on Wednesday, March 11, at 6:37 a.m. EDT, marking the final chapter for a spacecraft that reshaped scientists’ understanding of the radiation ...

In this episode, Astronomy magazine Editor Emeritus Dave Eicher invites you to explore a smattering of bright objects in the night sky — including a close encounter of the Moon and the Pleiades star ...

America’s second satellite, Vanguard 1, was launched into space on March 17, 1958. And though it only blasted off some six months after the Soviet’s Sputnik satellite, Vanguard 1 still remains in ...

Finally, some good news for Artemis 2: NASA has fixed the helium flow issue that pushed the mission’s launch window from March to April. The Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion spacecraft are ...