Just don’t call her four-eyes. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS to her friends) begins collecting data this month. Launched in April, she is equipped with four telescopes, two solar panels, and one mission...
Stephen Hawking was one of the brightest stars in the scientific firmament, but no star can burn forever. Sadly, The British cosmologist, who once held the same faculty chair as Sir Isaac Newton, passed...
Jupiter’s great red spot is shrinking! Could it disappear completely? The great red spot is Jupiter’s most iconic feature: a storm once three times the size of Earth, visible in a backyard telescope, with...
The forecast this weekend calls for thundershowers, which is very unfortunate, because it will cloud out one of the year’s astronomical highlights: the Perseid meteor shower. A meteor shower is a night (or...
Here is what we know: NASA announced on Wednesday the discovery of not one, not two, but SEVEN earth-sized exoplanets orbiting a small star within our galaxy. (An exoplanet is any planet outside of...
Some things happen every year, like celestial clockwork — the slow shifting of the constellations, regularly-scheduled meteor showers, and the phases of the moon. Those can be interesting enough, but it’s the rarer events...
Have you heard of the new Ninth Planet? No, not Pluto. That’s a minor planet now, and it’s not coming back. Far beyond the orbit of Pluto, in the icy wastes of the Scattered...
Although these photos are are beautiful, they are probably not real suns. The Earth, of course, only orbits the single sun of our solar system. Any image of a ‘second sun’ would have to...
