The countdown has begun. The crew is ready. And barring any last-minute hiccups, four astronauts on Wednesday will begin a journey that sends them farther from Earth than any human has gone before.

Exciting planetary action takes place this month. Venus and Uranus vie for attention and lie close to each other in late April. Jupiter offers a lot to observe through a telescope, particularly events ...

The months-long drama over NASA’s fiscal year 2026 budget has entered a critical new phase, with a looming government shutdown forcing a high-stakes confrontation over the agency’s future. The central ...

NASA’s Suomi NPP satellite captured this composite image of southern Africa and the surrounding oceans on April 9, 2015. As sea levels in these oceans rise due to climate change, Earth’s rotation ...

From Earth, we only ever see one side of the Moon. This is because the time it takes the Moon to rotate around its own axis happens to be the same amount of time it takes for the Moon to orbit Earth: ...

In a study published today in Science, researchers say they have solved a climate enigma — the inexplicable surge in global temperature in 2023, rising faster than climate models predicted. By ...

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 ...

The Moon passes 4° north of Jupiter at 8 A.M. EDT. By evening, they are high overhead in Gemini the Twins, now nearly 8° apart as the Moon sits near Pollux, the slightly brighter of the two brothers’ ...

Born March 24, 1893, in Germany, Wilhelm Heinrich Walter Baade earned his Ph.D. from the University of Gottingen in 1919. He went on to a career at the Hamburg Observatory, then, in the late 1920s, ...

As close as we astronomers love to feel to space, one thing stands between us and the outer reaches: Earth’s atmosphere. More than 60 miles (97 kilometers) of gases separate us from the cosmos, and it ...

Visible in Scotland, the total solar eclipse of Aug. 2, 1133, featured nearly 4½ minutes of totality. This eclipse provides just one of many historical examples of people wrongly associating a ...

A vertical dark band cutting through a bright nebula marks the protoplanetary disk surrounding the young star IRAS 04302+2247. Observations of such disks will help astronomers understand how small ...