Find all stories on Planets in this tag archive.
At the center of our galaxy is the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A*. Though it has a history of flickering, it has never glowed like it did in April and May, new …
Nicknamed Farout (but formally known as 2018 VG18) a pink-hued space object has been discovered orbiting the sun. It’s 22 billion miles further away than the second-most distant known object—and it takes …
Some 8,000 light-years away, a moon has been discovered—possibly the first one outside our own solar system. Dubbed an “exomoon,” the “Neptune-sized” gassy object, which orbits a “Jupiter-sized” planet, was spotted by …
Scott Sheppard’s astronomy division at the Carnegie Institution for Science hunts for objects in very distant parts of our Solar System. Sometimes, however, they’re able to scour areas closer—depending on the orbit …
The brainchild of James Yoder, a future Electrical and Computer Engineering student at the University of Texas at Austin, the website stuffin.space offers a realtime 3D map of Earth as seen from …
A small, frozen world known as (486958) 2014 MU69 is the next flyby destination for NASA’s New Horizons. Understandably, the space agency thinks it needs a snappier name. Some billion miles past …
Perhaps surprisingly, we don’t know the sun’s size—at least, not as accurately as we know the Earth or the moon. When working with Google Maps (to measure the sun’s shadow) and his …
Most individuals transfixed by the cosmos know what it’s like to fall into an internet black hole of space imagery and articles. Now, thanks to NASA, a 140,000 file database of photos, …
The news that NASA discovered an exoplanet system some 40 light-years (235 trillion miles) away from Earth—three of which are in the habitable (or Goldilocks) zone—was a big deal yesterday. Never a …
As the Atlantic puts it, the exoplanet Proxima b exists in its galaxy’s “Goldilocks” habitable zone: “No one will ever find a closer alien world than this.” The reason this happens to …