Looking Up by Bob Eklund

The McMurdo Dry Valleys, located in the Antarctic Victoria Land, are considered to be the most similar earthly equivalent to Mars. They make up one of the driest and most hostile environments on our planet, …[READ MORE]

SURF’S UP IN THE GALAXY: DETECTION OF GRAVITY WAVES. The announcement February 11 of the detection of gravitational waves by the LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory) team marks the beginning of a new kind of …[READ MORE]

The nitrogen ice glaciers on Pluto appear to carry an intriguing cargo: numerous, isolated hills that may be fragments of water ice from Pluto’s surrounding uplands. These hills individually measure one to several miles across, …[READ MORE]

New Year’s Day, 1801, the dawn of the 19th century, was a historic moment for astronomy, and for a space mission called Dawn more than 200 years later. That night, Giuseppe Piazzi pointed his telescope …[READ MORE]

A team of astronomers in the UK, USA, and Australia have found a planet, until now thought to be a free-floating or lonely planet, in a huge orbit around its star. Incredibly the object, designated …[READ MORE]

Caltech researchers have found evidence of a giant planet tracing a bizarre, highly elongated orbit in the distant solar system. The object, which the researchers have nicknamed Planet Nine, has a mass about 10 times …[READ MORE]

Globular star clusters are extraordinary in almost every way. They’re densely packed, holding a million stars in a ball only about 100 light-years across on average. They’re old, dating back almost to the birth of …[READ MORE]

In 2013, Chang’e-3, an unmanned lunar mission from China, touched down on the northern part of the Moon’s Imbrium Basin, one of the most prominent of the lava-filled impact basins visible from Earth. It was …[READ MORE]

The fantasy creations of the “Star Wars” universe are strikingly similar to real planets in our own Milky Way galaxy. A super-Earth in deep freeze? Think ice-planet Hoth. And that distant world with double sunsets …[READ MORE]

A thrilling chapter in the exploration of the solar system will soon conclude, as NASA’s Saturn-orbiting Cassini spacecraft makes its final close flyby of the ocean-bearing moon Enceladus. Cassini flew past Enceladus at a distance …[READ MORE]