Astrophysics

Twenty years ago today a magnetar’s epic tantrum made our planet ring like a bell from tens of thousands of light-years away

The Parker Solar Probe will swoop just 6.1 million kilometers above the sun’s surface on Christmas Eve. Scientists are thrilled at what we might learn

See the year’s most striking images from the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes, NASA’s Mars rover and the best sky watching on offer

The universe’s light-starved early epochs, as well as the first stars and galaxies, lie beyond the reach of conventional observatories but could be revealed by a new generation of radio telescope arrays

Odds are that we’re not truly alone in the cosmos. But practically speaking, we might as well be

The more exciting, transformative and revolutionary a science result appears, especially if it comes out of nowhere, the more likely it is to be dead wrong. So approach science headlines with a healthy amount of skepticism and patience

Called Olbers’ paradox, the seemingly simple mystery of the sky’s darkness is something that stumped astronomers for centuries

The nearby star Vega, featured in the 1997 movie Contact, appears to have a smooth disk devoid of giant planets for reasons we can’t explain

The Chandra X-ray Observatory is facing closure. Shutting it down would be a loss to science as a whole

Finding a perfect sphere is actually pretty difficult

A strange supernova remnant first appeared as a “guest star” seen in 1181 by sky watchers in China and Japan

Experiment shows that a nuclear explosion could save the planet from a deadly asteroid impact