Looking Up by Bob Eklund

Inhabitants of Minneapolis, Chicago, and St. Louis may be thinking that the American Midwest is the coldest place in the Universe. Well, almost, but not quite. At a cosmologically crisp one degree Kelvin (minus 458 …[READ MORE]

Legendary Beatles singer and songwriter John Lennon was among those honored when names were recently assigned to 10 impact craters on Planet Mercury. The International Astronomical Union (IAU)—the arbiter of planetary and satellite naming since …[READ MORE]

This holiday season, feast your eyes on images of Saturn and two of its most fascinating moons, Titan and Enceladus, in a care package from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. All three bodies are dressed and dazzling …[READ MORE]

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has discovered water vapor erupting from the frigid surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa, in one or more localized plumes near its south pole. Europa is already thought to harbor a …[READ MORE]

When NASA’s Juno spacecraft flew past Earth on Oct. 9, 2013, it received a boost in speed of more than 8,800 mph, which set it on course for a July 4, 2016, rendezvous with Jupiter, …[READ MORE]

Two thousand years ago, a Roman vessel with ingots of lead extracted from the Sierra of Cartagena sank in the waters off the coast of Sardinia. Since 2011, more than a hundred of these ingots …[READ MORE]

The IceCube Neutrino Observatory, a particle detector buried in a cubic kilometer of Antarctic ice, is a demonstration of the power of the human passion for discovery, where scientific ingenuity meets technological innovation. This week, …[READ MORE]

A comet that has caused a lot of excitement is racing toward a close encounter with the Sun on Thanksgiving Day. Comet ISON will pass about 700,000 miles above the Sun’s surface before whipping around …[READ MORE]

Astronomers viewing our solar system’s asteroid belt with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have seen for the first time an asteroid with six comet-like tails of dust radiating from it like spokes on a wheel. Unlike …[READ MORE]

One in Five Stars Has Earth-Size Planet in Habitable Zone — Scientists from University of California, Berkeley, and University of Hawaii, Manoa, have statistically determined that twenty percent of Sun-like stars in our galaxy have …[READ MORE]