Looking Up by Bob Eklund

Colorful new maps of dwarf planet Ceres, based on data from NASA’s Dawn spacecraft, showcase a diverse topography, with height differences between crater bottoms and mountain peaks as great as 9 miles. Scientists continue to …[READ MORE]

Scientists analyzing four years of data from NASA’s Kepler mission have released a new catalog of exoplanet candidates. The catalog adds more than 500 new possible planets to the 4,175 already found by the famed …[READ MORE]

The Breakthrough Prize Foundation and its founder, internet investor Yuri Milner, have committed $100 million to a major escalation in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI. This is about five times the amount of …[READ MORE]

The call everyone was waiting for is in. NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft phoned home just before 9 p.m. EDT Tuesday, July 14, to tell the mission team and the world it had accomplished the historic …[READ MORE]

Almost 2,000 exoplanets have been discovered to date, ranging from rocky Earth-like planets to hot Jupiters, and orbiting every type of star. But how many of these distant worlds are habitable? Today’s technology means that …[READ MORE]

In a long series of images obtained by New Horizons’ telescopic Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) between May 29 and June 19, Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, appear to more than double in size. …[READ MORE]

A laser-powered wafer-thin spacecraft capable of reaching Alpha Centauri in 20 years may sound like the stuff of science fiction, but it’s not. And while such a launch isn’t imminent, the possibility of one in …[READ MORE]

 Space is big, dark, and lonely. But some parts of it are more lonely than others. Most galaxies are clumped together in groups or clusters. A neighboring galaxy is never far away. But one galaxy, …[READ MORE]

New images of dwarf planet Ceres, taken by NASA’s Dawn spacecraft, show the cratered surface of this mysterious world—including its mysterious “bright spots”—in sharper detail than ever before. These are among the first snapshots from …[READ MORE]

Much ink has been spilled over Pluto’s reclassification as a dwarf planet. And yet, such discussions have not diminished scientific interest in Earth’s most distant cousin. A new study is the first to reveal fascinating …[READ MORE]