What do you do when the observation you need comes around once a year? Well, preparation is key, but this is the awkward truth about finding another Earth. When a planet crosses the face of its star, a sliver of starlight ...
Astronomy
Aug 13, 2026
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Boston College scientists have determined that a newly discovered meteorite from Mars is 1.27 billion years old and derived from a previously unsampled, pristine source on the Red Planet. The study is published in the journal ...
Planetary Sciences
Aug 9, 2026
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There is a question that often comes up at every public talk I do, and I have never had a good answer to it—well, not an entirely confident one. What's inside a black hole? The textbook reply is a singularity. Cross the event ...
Astronomy
Aug 12, 2026
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A Japanese probe flew 400 meters (1,312 feet) from a near-Earth asteroid this month, marking the closest approach ever recorded for such a mission, the space agency said.
Planetary Sciences
Jul 31, 2026
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Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers obtained high-contrast coronagraphic images of the protoplanetary disk around the young, nearby star TW Hydrae. Results of the observational campaign, published July ...
Using spectral data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), astronomers have gained some of the clearest evidence yet that white dwarf stars are accreting debris from disintegrating exoplanets. Captured while ...
Venus may be overwhelmingly inhospitable today, but many planetary scientists believe that it wasn't always this way. Billions of years ago, some observational evidence suggested that our planetary neighbor may have looked ...
Neptune's moon and ring system stand out among the giant planets because of the strange imbalance between its one very large moon and its many tiny moons. Its largest moon, Triton, makes up more than 99% of the mass of all ...
Science seems like a straightforward endeavor. You come up with a hypothesis, collect data to prove or disprove it, and analyze that data to see whether the hypothesis is right. But anyone who actually does science will tell ...
Astronomy
Aug 22, 2026
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Named for the mythical valley where the god Dionysus was raised in secret by nymphs, the asteroid 44 Nysa inhabits the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Through observations by the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers ...
