Astronomy news, features and articles

For the first time, astronomers have used a ground-based telescope to observe polarized microwave light from the universe's earliest epoch. Their observations could give them a better understanding of how the universe evolved.

NASA's Perseverance rover regularly images a Sherlock Holmes–themed maze to calibrate its chemical-hunting SHERLOC instrument.

The summer solstice, the longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere, falls on June 20 this year in North America.

New images of a young star, 2MASSJ1612, could have captured the birth of a giant gas planet larger than Jupiter.

NASA's Parker Solar Probe has directly observed a powerful magnetic explosion in the sun's corona that could help us predict geomagnetic storms on Earth.

The famous black hole M87 keeps surprising us. New research calculates its spin speed to be at 80% of the theoretical limit, with matter falling into its maw even faster.

A new study debates the complex ethical questions that must be considered if we're to terraform Mars and lays the blueprint for a potential path forward.

The largest map of the universe, created with data from the James Webb Space Telescope, shows almost 800,000 galaxies crammed into a tiny piece of sky and spanning almost all of time.