Astronomers have a habit of naming things exactly what they look like, and Green Pea galaxies earned their nickname honestly, small, round, and distinctly...
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....
On September 15, 2017, mission controllers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory watched a signal go quiet, one they had deliberately sent a spacecraft to lose. Cassini wasn't broken. It wasn't malfunctioning. Every instrument still worked. Engineers destroyed it anyway, steering it straight into Saturn's...
Jupiter took most of the leftover material from the Sun's own formation, ending up with more mass than every other planet in the solar system combined, twice over. Here's what that actually means in numbers, how far it sits from the Sun, and why...
Almost everyone has spotted the Big Dipper at some point, even people who swear they know nothing about the night sky. It's that seven-star shape that looks like a ladle or a saucepan, hanging up there so plainly that you don't need a telescope,...