Joanna Thompson

A five-year leak on a Russian module of the International Space Station has gotten worse over time. Now, NASA and Russia's Roscosmos space agency disagree just how bad it is.

Pluto was demoted from a planet to a dwarf planet in 2006. So why is its status still so controversial today?

A recently shared image of a distant galaxy surrounded by three concentric rings challenges our understanding of galactic taxonomy.

How many moons does Jupiter have? Scientists have discovered dozens of them, but the answer may be more complicated than it seems.

China's mysterious Shenlong space plane has released an unidentified object in orbit — the seventh such object released in the past six months. The U.S. Space Force is monitoring the situation.

A new study debunks the idea that domestic dogs specifically evolved puppy dog eyes to tug on our heartstrings.

Using the James Webb Space Telescope, scientists have discovered evidence of a carbon-rich atmosphere around the hellish world 55 Cancri e. This marks the best evidence yet of an atmosphere around a rocky exoplanet.

A new Japanese mission to photograph space junk from orbit marks a milestone in orbital debris cleanup efforts.

A new study of vertebrate evolution reveals that we have more in common with spooky-looking fish called lampreys than we thought.

Eclipses can be strange. Here are some of the weird things you can expect to experience during the April 8 total eclipse.

Dozens of boulders dislodged by NASA's asteroid-smashing DART test could hit Mars in the future, new research suggests.

First predicted by Einstein more than a century ago, lasers have shaped our modern technological landscape. But how do they work?

Headaches are a common and recurring problem in space, even for astronauts that don't experience them on Earth.

A communications glitch is preventing NASA's Voyager 1 probe — the farthest spacecraft from Earth in history — from sending home data, and mission scientists are growing concerned.

The JET nuclear fusion reactor in the UK has set a new world record for total energy output. However, the reactor's record-smashing test will be its last.

For the first time, scientists discovered a powerful 'black hole wind' that blew through a nearby galaxy for hundreds of days, crushing star formation and reshaping the galaxy. Something similar may already have happened in the Milky Way.

Scientists have discovered complex molecules in the gas and vapor plumes escaping from Enceladus's icy core — and one of them, hydrogen cyanide, is a precursor for life.

Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have spotted what may be the smallest known brown dwarf, a "failed star" that's only three or four times larger than Jupiter.

The massive planet LHS 3154b orbits a star much smaller than Earth's sun, and its discovery could upend everything we think we know about how solar systems form.

Last summer, a Harvard professor claimed tiny pellets of iron came from beyond our solar system. But new analyses suggest that they likely originated much closer to home.

Researchers have simulated how comets pinballing from one planet to another could deliver critical organic molecules to exoplanets.

In a first, researchers discovered oxygen atoms on the dayside and nightside of Venus' atmosphere.

Additional images from NASA's Lucy mission reveal that the "moon" orbiting asteroid Dinkinesh is actually a contact binary, made of two smaller moons touching.

Astronomers have captured ultrafast radio bursts from 3 billion light-years away for the first time ever.

The exoplanet WASP-17b's atmosphere is full of quartz clouds, according to a new James Webb Space Telescope observations.