Stories by Sharmila Kuthunur

Material from asteroid Ryugu riddled with earthly microbes provides a cautionary tale for scientists seeking signs of alien life

An ambitious U.S. government program is working to detect and track millions of tiny space junk pieces—down to the size of a sand grain—throughout low-Earth orbit and beyond

Scientists have found signs of fresh flowing lava on Venus in decades-old data from NASA's Magellan spacecraft

Northern and southern lights produced by a recent bout of severe space weather may rival the most intense auroras of the past 500 years

Purple may be a likely color for extraterrestrial organisms, research suggests

Giant bubbles erupting across this red supergiant star’s surface could solve a lingering astrophysical mystery

The subsurface ocean of Jupiter’s moon Europa may have far less oxygen—and less potential for life—than previously believed, according to data from NASA’s Juno spacecraft

A ghostly giant galaxy called Nube may become a testbed for esoteric theories of dark matter

A new analysis finds that images from Voyager 2's close encounter with Neptune show the planet as being far too blue

Six “sub-Neptune” worlds locked in a delicate dance around a nearby star offer fresh insights for the orbital evolution of planetary systems

A surprisingly complex galaxy cluster suggests that in the search for dark matter, nothing is as simple as it seems