Space

Mercury is a little-known, still mysterious world. But one thing is certain. Mercury, the closest planet to the sun, can’t actually travel backward in retrograde, and doesn’t impact us on Earth. The notion of Mercury retrograde, a common reference in astrology wherein communication and travel are temporarily impaired, can, of …

Using images from a NASA telescope, three amateur scientists discovered a star-like object sprinting through space — so fast, in fact, it’ll whiz right out of the Milky Way. This freak of nature, traveling about 1 million mph, will escape the clutch of the galaxy. It’s the first time anyone …

It’s good to know that our planetary defense systems work. The European Space Agency revealed that on July 6 the automated systems that sleuth the skies for potentially hazardous objects like asteroids sent out a warning. “The object, estimated at around 50 m [164 feet] in diameter, was spotted hurtling …

Mercury retrograde has long permeated our culture in an attempt to explain phenomena like communication issues or travel woes. Here is what is actually happening when Mercury is “in retrograde.”

A menacing asteroid, some six miles wide, triggered Earth’s last mass extinction. Now, scientists have found where it originated. Unlike most space rocks that impact our planet today, this behemoth object came from beyond the gas giant Jupiter. It was a “C-type asteroid” — which are the dark, carbon-rich leftovers …

A pioneering NASA robot detected over a thousand quakes on Mars. It also may have revealed a huge reservoir of water. Planetary scientists used unprecedented data collected by the space agency’s InSight lander, which recorded geologic activity on Mars for four years, to reveal that water may exist many miles …

Mars didn’t lose all its water without a fight. The planet, today 1,000 times drier than the driest desert on Earth, gradually lost its insulating atmosphere. The Red Planet’s once great Martian lakes and rivers evaporated some 3 billion years ago, and the rocky world plunged into a global freeze. …

Somewhere in the galaxy, an advanced alien civilization might harness energy from its star. And NASA wants to know if it could detect this activity. The space agency has some powerful telescopes — and it’s building more. As scientists increasingly peer at other rocky, Earth-like worlds, they evaluated whether it’s …

Black holes are misunderstood. They’re almost inconceivably dense objects, which grants them immense gravitational power. (If Earth was hypothetically crushed into a black hole, it would be under an inch across.) Not even light can escape, if it falls in. But black holes aren’t incessantly sucking up everything in space …

Perhaps surprisingly, the majority of stars in the galaxy are not sun clones but smaller orbs of gas and plasma known as red dwarfs, about half the size of Earth’s star. Astronomers have had their sights set on these stars as tantalizing places to look for habitable worlds for a …