Space

 IGR J18245-2452, located about 18,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Sagittarius in a cluster of stars known as M28, is a neutron star with the peculiar ability to transform…

If you began to travel to the star nearest to us after ol' Sol, named Alpha Centauri, it takes about four light years.   Now imagine there were instead 10,000 other stars crammed into that 25…

In my last article, "Does Earth Share Microbes With Mars Via Meteorites - Or Are They Interestingly Different For Life?" I talked about the NRC study, which looked at the same meteorite data as…

Robert Zubrin says that there are no contamination issues involved in colonizing Mars, because microbes get transferred between the planets all the time on meteorites. His ideas get a lot of…

The solar system is crowded with small objects like asteroids and comets, and most have stable orbits which keep them out of harm’s way, but a small proportion of them are in orbits that risk…

Predicting the behavior of a sunspot cycle is fairly reliable once the cycle is well underway (about 3 years after the minimum in sunspot number occurs(1). Prior to that time the predictions are less…

6,000 light-years away, in the constellation of Scorpius, nebula IC 4628 is a huge region filled with gas and clumps of dark dust which produces brilliant hot young stars. In visible light, these…

NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft has been hurtling away from the Sun since it was launched in 1977 and various reports have indicated that the spacecraft has left the heliosphere, the bubble of hot,…

Astronomers have provided the best three-dimensional map yet of the central parts of the Milky Way. It shows that the inner regions take on a peanut-like appearance from some angles. This odd shape…

Astronomers has begun to map the location of the most massive and mysterious objects in our galaxy – the Southern Milky Way and its giant gas clouds, where new stars are born. Using the 22 meter…