Harry Baker

Astronauts on board China's "heavenly palace" space station have demonstrated a new way of making rocket fuel products and breathable oxygen by mimicking a chemical reaction in plants. The technology could be utilized in China's planned moon base.

Earth from space This 2022 satellite photo shows the summit of "one of the world's most dangerous volcanoes," Mount Vesuvius, peering up through a strange gap in the clouds.

The record-breaking winds are circling the nearby "puffy" exoplanet WASP-127b, and are traveling six times faster than the alien world spins.

Images captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory have revealed that "coronal loops" give off subtle flashes of ultraviolet light before a solar flare, which could act as an early warning system for dangerous space weather.

A new study suggests that the explosive deaths of the universe's earliest stars created surprising quantities of water that may have sparked extraterrestrial life in the very first galaxies.

New photos of comet C/2024 G3 (ATLAS) suggest that it could be disintegrating due to "thermal stress" from its recent slingshot around the sun. However, its fate is still unclear.

Data collected by NASA's InSight lander suggest that ancient internal processes are responsible for the "Martian dichotomy" that splits the Red Planet into two distinct halves.

The new composite image, which combines hundreds of photos from the Hubble Space Telescope, shows the Andromeda Galaxy with more than 200 million individually resolved stars.

Earth from space A stunning composite image, made up of three years' worth of satellite photos, shows the ancient lava of Libya's Haruj volcanic field interspersed with patches of golden sand.

NASA astronaut Don Pettit has snapped a striking shot of the super-bright comet racing past our planet for the first time in 160,000 years, as it lit up the night skies across the globe.

The newly discovered "blazar," which has a mass equal to 700 million suns, is the oldest of its kind ever seen and changes what we know about the early universe.

A new way of measuring structures deep inside Earth has highlighted numerous previously unknown blobs within our planet's mantle. These anomalies are surprisingly similar to sunken chunks of Earth's crust but appear in seemingly impossible places.

Earth from space A 2023 satellite image captured a pair of peculiar phenomena painting parallel swirls in the sea and sky around Norway's Bear Island, which is surrounded by extremely radioactive waters left behind by a doomed Soviet submarine.

A newfound "chicken-size" dinosaur, recently unearthed in Wyoming, changes what paleontologists thought they knew about how dinosaurs spread across the globe.

There were significantly more X-class solar flares in 2024 than any other year for at least three decades. The arrival of solar maximum was a key reason for the spike, but other factors were also at play.

New research suggests that most of the atoms within the human body likely spent part of their lives drifting beyond the Milky Way on a cosmic "conveyor belt," before eventually returning to our galaxy.

Photos from the James Webb Space Telescope have revealed more than 40 stars within the gravitationally lensed "Dragon Arc" galaxy, 6.5 billion light-years from Earth. It is the largest group of individually imaged stars ever seen at such a distance.

Earth from space This 2014 satellite photo shows Pakistan's Khor Kalmat tidal lagoon brimming with water at the heart of an arid desert. This fluctuating body of water, which looks like "ink bleeding onto parchment," helps support life in this harsh environment.

From arachnid-like formations and mysterious blobs to an underground ocean and a giant volcano, here are our 10 favorite things scientists discovered on Mars this year.

Earth from space A 2023 astronaut photo captured a rare effect, known as sunglint, transforming the surface of one of Russia's deepest lakes into a sea of swirling clouds. The crater lake is sandwiched between a pair of unusual volcanic "nesting dolls" on a Pacific island.

From astronauts getting stranded on a leaking ISS and faceplanting moon landers to injured Mars robots and a tumbling solar sail, here are 10 of the biggest space exploration mishaps in 2024.

Earth from space A 2018 astronaut photo shows a festive, fir-tree-shaped artificial reservoir in Iraq decorated with both natural and imagined ornaments.

The sun's most active phase, solar maximum, officially arrived in 2024, triggering some explosive solar storms and colorful auroras. Here are 10 of our favorite solar outbursts this year.

NASA's record-breaking Parker Solar Probe will smash its own personal bests for proximity to the sun and fastest speed by a human-made object when it whizzes past our star on Christmas Eve (Dec. 24). It is unlikely to get significantly closer to the sun before the end of its mission.

The James Webb Space Telescope has captured an image of a baby, Milky Way-like galaxy that formed more than 13 billion years ago. This "Firefly Sparkle" galaxy could reveal how our own galaxy evolved.