A constellation is a group of stars that forms a recognizable pattern in the night sky, one we've given a name, usually after a mythological figure, animal, or object. There are 88 of them officially recognized, and together they map out the entire sky....
Everyone knows their star sign. It's on birthday cards, dating profiles, and the back page of magazines. But long before the zodiac became a horoscope staple, it was pure astronomy: a ring of star patterns that ancient people used as a giant calendar in...
Henrietta Leavitt spent her career at Harvard doing work considered too tedious for the men around her, poring over photographic plates by hand, cataloging faint points of light for 25 to 30 cents an hour. She wasn't allowed to operate the observatory's telescopes herself....
For two decades, the search for another Earth has run into the same maddening wall. Astronomers could find rocky planets sitting at exactly the right distance from their star for liquid water to exist, but they had no way to confirm whether any of...