Science & Astronomy

Ours is a moon with two faces: The nearside boasts a thinner and smoother crust, the farside is dotted by impact craters left nearly undisturbed by lava flows.

Buried oceans like the one sloshing beneath the icy surface of the Jupiter moon Europa may be far more common across the cosmos than scientists had imagined.

Scientists may be one step closer to solving the mystery of water on the moon; the secret may lie in a synergistic interaction between the solar wind, micrometeorites and moon dust.

The Giant Magellan Telescope has notched some important milestones on its path to 'first light' in the mid-2020s.

Visit the right patch of desert along the border of Libya and Egypt, and you could stumble on pieces of pale yellow glass, the traces of a meteorite impact that took place 29 million years ago.

Curiosity will be coming 'round the Martian mountain when it comes — and a colorful new animation highlights where exactly the mission is headed.

Congress can sometimes feel as distant and impenetrable as a black hole — which was the topic of a House Science Committee hearing held yesterday (May 16).

A surprisingly gentle merger between two small primordial bodies formed the distant object Ultima Thule, a new study suggests.

We can't see it. It might not be made of normal matter. Our telescopes haven't directly detected it at all. But it sure seems like it's out there.

A whole day on the moon lasts 28 Earth days.

When stars about the sun's size swell into red giants and finally dwindle into white dwarfs, their planets may be kicked out of the system or consumed.

If humans mine one-eighth of the solar system's extraterrestrial resources, we could be doomed.

The first rover on the far side of the moon may have discovered the first samples from the moon's mantle, released from the lunar interior by a giant, ancient cosmic impact, a new study finds.

An independent space service under the Air Force would add up to $1.3 billion a year in costs, says CBO, far more than DoD's estimate of $500 million.

Science popularizer Bill Nye told viewers of a popular late-night show that Earth is "on [expletive] fire" while lighting a globe with a blowtorch.

It may sound like the stuff of science fiction, but scientists have already detected a time warp.

New images of one of Mars' moons show a sweet surprise: It looks like candy. The moon, Phobos, shines like a rainbow-colored jawbreaker in new images from NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft.

Supervillains take note: Even the biggest and baddest asteroids may not be 100% effective as a doomsday devices.

After these ripples in space and time pass through the universe, they may leave behind a sort of memory of their crossing.