Looking Up by Bob Eklund

NASA has selected nine science instruments for a mission to Jupiter’s moon Europa, to investigate whether the mysterious icy moon could harbor conditions suitable for life. NASA’s Galileo mission yielded strong evidence that Europa, about …[READ MORE]

An international team of researchers led by Pieter van Dokkum of Yale University has used the W. M. Keck Observatory to confirm the existence of the most diffuse class of galaxies known in the universe. …[READ MORE]

An international team of astronomers led by UC Santa Cruz and Yale University has pushed back the cosmic frontier of galaxy exploration to a time when the universe was only 5 percent of its present …[READ MORE]

For the first time, images from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft are revealing bright and dark regions on the surface of faraway Pluto—the primary target of the New Horizons close flyby in mid-July. The images were …[READ MORE]

Astronomers building an Earth-size virtual telescope capable of photographing the event horizon of the black hole at the center of our Milky Way have extended their instrument to the bottom of the Earth—the South Pole—thanks …[READ MORE]

Saturday, April 25 is the night of all nights for you to look skyward. That’s when the whole world will be celebrating the “Global Star Party”—an evening devoted to appreciating the skies that surround our …[READ MORE]

The Sun undergoes a type of seasonal variability with its activity waxing and waning over the course of nearly two years, according to a new study by a team of researchers led by the National …[READ MORE]

Peering into space, the surface of Mercury appears dark and unreflective, an observation that has long puzzled planetary scientists due to the planet’s very low surface abundance of iron (less than 2 percent). Iron is …[READ MORE]

This spring, our Sun and Moon happen to be so aligned that first the Moon’s shadow falls on the Earth and then, two weeks later, the Earth’s shadow falls on the Moon. The result: sky-watchers …[READ MORE]

A team composed of astronomers and biologists has measured the multicolored “chemical fingerprints” of 137 different species of microorganisms in order to help future astronomers recognize life on the surface of exoplanets (planets outside our …[READ MORE]