Astronomy, features and articles | Educational Science

May 31, 2020

An annular solar eclipse is happening on the summer solstice. (But no, it’s not the end of days.)

Editor's Note: This article was updated to correct the date of the solstice. It was June 20, not 21. The summer solstice isn't the only celestial event on the books this weekend. An annular solar eclipse dubbed the ring of fire will also awe skygazers as the moon passes between...

Apr 30, 2020

Astronomers discover closest black hole to Earth. And you can 'see' it.

A newfound black hole may be the closest black hole to Earth, and you can spot its cosmic home in the night sky without a telescope. The black hole, which is lurking 1,000 light-years from Earth in the southern constellation of Telescopium, belongs to a system with two companion stars...

Apr 30, 2020

Massive piece of Chinese space junk slams uncontrolled into Earth's atmosphere

A 19.6-ton (17,800 kilograms) Chinese rocket slammed into our planet today (May 11). The bulky Long March 5B became the heaviest orbiting thing to fall uncontrolled to Earth in nearly three decades, according to Jonathan McDowell, a Harvard astrophysicist and orbital object tracker. The last time a heavier object had...

Apr 30, 2020

Ancient 'ring of fire' galaxy found glaring at Earth across space and time

Eleven billion years ago, a hot, active, galaxy that looked like an eye glared across space. Now, using data from the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii and the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have captured a snapshot of its unblinking gaze. This galaxy, R5519, is made up of a flat ring...

Apr 30, 2020

Mysterious 'Fermi Bubbles' may be the result of black hole indigestion 6 million years ago

The center of the Milky Way is a puzzle of invisible, interconnected blobs. There are swooping tendrils of energy visible only in radio wavelengths, hourglass-shaped scars of X-ray light and — towering over it all — the mysterious Fermi Bubbles. These twin orbs of gas, dust and cosmic rays emerge...

Apr 30, 2020

Sun unleashes biggest flare since 2017. Is our star waking up?

The sun may be coming out of its slumber at long last. On Friday morning (May 29), our star fired off its strongest flare since October 2017, an eruption spotted by NASA's sun-watching Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). Solar flares are bursts of radiation that originate from sunspots, temporary dark and...

Mar 31, 2020

How to see tonight's pink supermoon, the largest full moon of 2020

Tonight's pink moon must have not gotten the memo about social distancing; the moon will be the closest to Earth today than any other day of the year, making it the largest full moon of 2020. Granted, the moon is more than the prerequisite 6 feet (1.8 meters) away from...

Mar 31, 2020

Apollo 13 at 50: How NASA turned near disaster at the moon into a 'successful failure' in space

Fifty years ago today (April 11), three astronauts launched to space, poised to be the next humans to walk on the moon. But things didn't exactly go according to plan. Famously described as a successful failure, the Apollo 13 mission almost ended in complete and utter disaster. However, while the...

Mar 31, 2020

China wants a piece of the moon. Here's how it plans to handle lunar samples.

A glimpse into China's readiness to handle samples from the moon reveals steps to be taken for storage, processing and preparation of the specimens. China's Chang'e 5 robotic moon mission is scheduled to launch later this year. That venture represents the third phase of China's Chang'e lunar exploration program: returning...

Mar 31, 2020

NASA reveals stunning 'Cosmic Reef' blasting to life in nearby galaxy

Young stars blaze to life in a nearby galaxy, repainting their cosmic neighborhood with fiery blooms of gas and radiation. This new Hubble Space Telescope image captures just another day in the life of two young nebulas (one red, one blue) in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of...

Mar 31, 2020

Big asteroid shows itself ahead of Earth flyby on April 29

We've now got a good visual on the big space rock that's going to fly by Earth next week. On Saturday (April 18), the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico captured a radar image of the asteroid 1998 OR2, which will zoom within 3.9 million miles (6.3 million kilometers) of our...

Jan 31, 2020

'Vampire' star sparks brilliant 'super-outburst' while gorging on its neighbor

A vampire dwarf star is sucking the life force from its partner star, and their entanglement produced a rare superoutburst. NASA detailed this previously unknown dwarf nova, a brief eruption from dwarf stars, in a statement on Jan. 24. The system brightened by a factor of 1,600 over less than...

Jan 31, 2020

Possible new 'minimoon' discovered orbiting Earth

Tumbling through Earth's increasingly crowded orbit are about 5,000 satellites, half a million pieces of human-made debris and only one confirmed natural object: the moon. Now, astronomers working out of the University of Arizona's Steward Observatory think they may have discovered a second natural satellite — or at least a...

Dec 31, 2019

Will Bright Star Betelgeuse Finally Explode?

One of the brightest stars in the sky has been dimming. But, while it might be signaling that it's ready to explode, it's probably just fading because of strange, stellar physics. Betelgeuse, a reddish star that's one of the brightest in the night sky, has been noticeably fainting, or getting...

Nov 30, 2021

Rare total solar eclipse over Antarctica dazzles ... the penguins

Anyone in Antarctica today would have experienced the only total solar eclipse of the year, suggesting one of the largest groups of individuals to observe the gorgeous show would have been the southern continent's penguins. And that's a huge population of spectators. During a solar eclipse, the moon moves between...