Why Is It So Hard to Land on the Moon? By Adam Mann Despite the fact that humans landed on the moon many times during the Apollo missions half a century ago, doing so remains a tough business.
A Skyscraper-Size Asteroid Will Zoom Past Earth Saturday Night By Rafi Letzter Astronomers are working to track space rocks like these.
Afterglow of Colliding Neutron Stars Would Outshine Our Sun By Rafi Letzter A new, hours-long Hubble study of the collision site revealed never-before-seen details of the neutron-star merger
2nd-Known Interstellar Visitor May Have Breezed Through Our Solar System By Meghan Bartels A bright speck in the night sky may be the second known object to hurtle through our solar system after leaving another.
This Ridiculously Speedy Star Might Be Running Away from a Rare, Unproven Type of Black Hole By Brandon Specktor I'd be running, too.
A Distant Black Hole Brightens Every 9 Hours, and No One Knows Why By Rafi Letzter Something's disrupting the distant black hole's accretion disk, but no one knows what it is.
Gargantuan 'Bubbles' of Radio Energy Spotted at the Center of Our Galaxy. How'd They Get There? By Brandon Specktor Two huge bubbles of radio energy swirling out of the Milky Way's middle could be evidence of an ancient cosmic explosion — or maybe the start of a new one.
Mysterious Alien Planet Has Water in Its Atmosphere. Could Life Survive There? By Chelsea Gohd In a major first, scientists have detected water vapor and possibly even liquid water clouds on a strange exoplanet that lies in the habitable zone of its host star about 110 light-years from Earth.
Is Interstellar Travel Really Possible? By Paul Sutter Interstellar flight is a real pain in the neck.
Right Again, Einstein! Wobbling Pulsar Confirms General Relativity By Tim Childers A pulsar 25,000 light-years away is wobbling in a weird way. But Einstein's theory of general relativity predicted it more than a century ago.
3 Asteroids Are Zipping Past Earth Today By Mindy Weisberger Hundreds of orbiting comets and asteroids are thought to present some risk of colliding with Earth, but the threat is typically very small.
Unpiloted Russian Soyuz Capsule Returns to Earth with Humanoid on Board By Tariq Malik An uncrewed Russian Soyuz returned to Earth Friday (Sept. 6), bring a humanoid robot home to wrap up first-of-its-kind test flight to the International Space Station.
India Loses Contact with Lunar Lander During Historic Mission By Meghan Bartels India's daring moon mission, Chandrayaan-2, lost contact just above the lunar surface, dashing Indian dreams of becoming just the fourth country to successfully land on the moon.
The 'Fireworks Galaxy' Is Exploding in X-Ray Light, and Scientists Are Confused By Brandon Specktor Scientists spotted a mysterious blast of intense X-ray light flashing out of the distant Fireworks galaxy, and it's no mere supernova.
Astronomers Decode Weird X-Ray Pattern Coming from Neutron Star By Rafi Letzter Astronomers have detected a neutron star system blasting X-ray light at Earth and detected a rare, months-long pattern in those light bursts.
Mysterious Skyglow 'STEVE' May Have Been Lurking in an Aurora on Labor Day By Stephanie Pappas Scientists are analyzing data from the Labor Day auroral light show to find out if a phenomenon known as STEVE was part of the picture.
'Einstein's Biggest Blunder' May Have Finally Been Fixed By Tim Childers The cosmological constant has plagued physicists for more than a century.
First Ever Black Hole Image Earns Researchers a $3 Million Prize By Mindy Weisberger The team of researchers that captured the first direct image of a black hole was honored with an "Oscar of Science" — the 2020 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics.
2 Giant Blobs at the Core of Our Galaxy Are Spewing Radiation. Scientists Don't Know How They Got There. By Paul Sutter The two giant blobs remain mysterious, nearly a decade after their discovery.
What's the Difference Between Asteroids, Comets and Meteors? By Tim Childers Look! Up in the sky! It's an asteroid.... No, it's a comet.... Wait, it's neither?
