In May, NASA's Swift satellite imaged comet Siding Spring, which is going to play a bit of a game of chicken with  Mars later this year.  "Fresh" comets like Siding Spring, which is…

Pluto orbits the sun more than 29 times farther away than Earth, with a surface temperature estimated to be about 380 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. The environment on Pluto, which 2 percent of…

The standard cosmological model is the frame of reference for generations of scientists but some question its ability to accurately reproduce what is observed in the nearby universe.  Dwarf…

Many people care deeply about the possibility of tigers, lemurs and such like becoming extinct in the wild. I'd like to suggest we care as much about the possibility of Mars microbes becoming extinct…

Space looks empty but unseen to the naked eye, a wind of charged particles pummels us from the Sun, carrying a magnetic field with it. Sometimes this solar wind can break through the Earth’s magnetic…

Will anyone own land in space? Could an individual, company or country claim the Moon? Will we have countries in space, organized by ideas and religions, and territories just as we have on Earth?…

Will anyone own land in space? Could an individual, company or country claim the Moon? Will we have countries in space, organized by ideas and religions, and territories just as we have on Earth?…

In 1975, physicist Kip Thorne and astronomer Anna Żytkow proposed that there are hybrids of red supergiant and neutron stars that superficially resemble normal red supergiants, such as Betelguese in…

A gamma-ray burst of light from the enormous explosion of a star more 12.1 billion years ago — shortly after the Big Bang — recently reached Earth and was visible in the sky. Gamma-ray bursts are…

Kapteyn's Star, named after Dutch astronomer Jacobus Kapteyn, who discovered it at the end of the 19th century, is the second fastest-moving star in the sky and belongs to the Galactic halo, an…