Astronomy

Claims of alien starships visiting Earth always fall short, but people still fall for them

We can and should look harder for evidence of alien visitors to our solar system

New research suggests the Great Red Spot we see on Jupiter today is an entirely different giant storm from the one astronomers observed more than three centuries ago

The cosmos is dark. The Lilly-Madau diagram reveals that it will become much darker still

Almost everything we know about the cosmos is conveyed by photons traveling across vast distances

The human brain loves seeing patterns, even when they aren’t really there

An image of interstellar dust moving through the Milky Way’s magnetic field may help scientists learn more about the origin of galaxies

Cosmic happenstance and biological evolution come together to create a road map to the stars

The latest images from Euclid, a European mission studying dark matter and dark energy, are spectacularly beautiful—and scientifically promising

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope observed an unusually large and highly luminous galaxy at a record-breaking 290 million years after the big bang

We should—and must—take careful measure of what we name cosmic objects and the terms we use throughout science

The next time you snap a selfie, consider thanking an astronomer for your phone’s camera