Astronomy

The familiar zodiac constellations are defined by Earth’s motion around the sun, but they don’t define your fate

Will still more auroras ring out 2024, a year marked by the celestial displays?

Twenty years ago today a magnetar’s epic tantrum made our planet ring like a bell from tens of thousands of light-years away

With billions of stars in the Milky Way, some nomenclature standardization is necessary

See the year’s most striking images from the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes, NASA’s Mars rover and the best sky watching on offer

As wildfires grow in severity and frequency, they’re not only threatening lives but also our visual connection to the cosmos

The celestial equivalent to latitude and longitude lets astronomers find their way across the heavens

Barnard 68 is often mistaken for a hole in space, but it’s actually a dense, opaque cloud of dust—for now

“Twilight rays” are but one of several viewing treats for the liminal time between day and night

The more exciting, transformative and revolutionary a science result appears, especially if it comes out of nowhere, the more likely it is to be dead wrong. So approach science headlines with a healthy amount of skepticism and patience

Called Olbers’ paradox, the seemingly simple mystery of the sky’s darkness is something that stumped astronomers for centuries

The nearby star Vega, featured in the 1997 movie Contact, appears to have a smooth disk devoid of giant planets for reasons we can’t explain