Brandon Specktor

Buying Guide Here are the best telescopes for a range of different purposes and budgets — beginner to smart telescopes and everything in between. Keep your eyes peeled for deals, too.

Twin orbs of superhot plasma at the Milky Way's center known as the "Fermi bubbles" contain inexplicable clouds of cold hydrogen, new research reveals.

A large lunar crater featured in the iconic 'Earthrise' photo has just helped the European JUICE spacecraft hone its alien-hunting instruments during a once-in-a-lifetime flyby.

On Sunday, Sept. 29, Earth captured a new "mini-moon" called 2024 PT5. The bus-size asteroid is expected to orbit our planet for 57 days, but is too small to be visible to amateur skywatchers.

NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams will spend at least eight consecutive months aboard the International Space Station as their Boeing Starliner spacecraft returns to Earth empty. Is their extended spaceflight record-setting?

A UK-based astrophotographer captured this stunning composite image of the Perseid meteor shower raining "shooting stars" over Stonehenge.

A private company has received funding from the U.S. government to build the first-ever "streetlights" on the moon — towering, Statue of Liberty-sized structures that could withstand the brutal lunar night.

The total solar eclipse on April 8 plunged Syracuse, New York's Milton J. Rubenstein Museum of Science & Technology into darkness for 90 seconds, creating a wondrous and memorable totality.

The James Webb Space Telescope has discovered a massive chain of 20 galaxies in the early universe, raising questions about the formation of the largest structures in the cosmos.

In the glare of the sun, an unknown number of near-Earth asteroids move on unseen orbits. A new generation of space telescopes could be our best defense against potential disaster.

Stars could be sliced in half by "relativistic blades," or ultra-powerful outflows of plasma shaped by extremely strong magnetic fields, an unpublished paper claims.

NASA's Parker Solar Probe has reached a record-breaking speed as it gets a gravitational assist from Venus to fall closer to the sun's scorching surface.

You can't stare at the sun, so how do you watch an eclipse? By reflecting it off of a disco ball, a team of astronomers suggests.

Asteroid Dimorphos, which NASA intentionally hit with a rocket during its DART mission in September 2022, is behaving in unpredicted ways.

Gigantic jets, which are 50 times more powerful than typical lightning bolts and can reach the edge of space, were seen erupting out of Hurricane Franklin near Puerto Rico.

Scientists studying a star system in Orion witnessed one of the most powerful stellar eruptions ever seen — and it could be devastating to nearby planets.

The potentially hazardous asteroid 2023 FM is larger than a 40-story building and will zoom within 7.5 lunar distances from Earth on Thursday, April 6, according to NASA.

The newly discovered asteroid 2023 DW could collide with Earth in February 2046, although the odds of an impact are low.

A broken hill, an ancient crater and the human tendency to find faces everywhere may explain the teddy bear on Mars.

New time-lapse images of the beautiful Butterfly Nebula come closer to explaining its spectacular strangeness.