Space

Every now and then, robots on the surface of Mars, or the spacecraft orbiting the planet, send back some fascinating images of rock formations on the Red Planet. These can range from the interesting (such as the donut-shaped rock that may not be from the planet) to the silly (hello, avocado rock. What’s up, big pile of “bones” on Mars?). […]

For decades, a scattering of ruins in southeastern Europe was dismissed as little more than an unremarkable military outpost, but new excavations are rewriting that story. Archaeologists now believe the site may be the lost capital of an ancient kingdom with direct ties to none other than Alexander the Great, the ferocious conqueror whose campaigns

One of the most spectacular galaxies in Earth’s sky is the subject of a new image release to help celebrate 35 years of Hubble operations. The Sombrero Galaxy (Messier 104), located some 31 million light-years away in the direction of the constellation Virgo, is a strange galaxy, oriented in such a way that it appears even stranger

 There is a massive black hole with millions of times more mass than our sun is plunging towards Earth and will one day annihilate life as we know it.This particular black hole is coming towards us at 110 kilometres per second and is at the center of the Great Andromeda Galaxy – the Milky Way’s

Given the seeming paucity of moisture in the leftover remains of Earth’s building blocks, planetary scientists have long assumed our planet’s water supply came after it formed in a rain of hydrogen-soaked rocks and comets.A new study by researchers from the University of Oxford and the UK’s national synchrotron science facility challenges the theory that

A surprise discovery in Gale Crater is the component that was missing in the puzzle of Mars‘s climate history. There, embedded in the bedrock, the Curiosity rover has identified a mineral called siderite that can only have formed from the precipitation of carbon from the Martian atmosphere. In other words, billions of years ago, Mars had an active

Over 46 years since its release, Voyager 1—NASA’s farthest and oldest spacecraft—has returned a message from the boundary of our solar system that’s disrupting the way we consider the space outside our solar neighborhood. What it confirmed is something scientists have long theorized but never actually established—until now. The interface between our solar system and

Astronomers have stumbled on a black hole roughly 600,000 times more massive than the Sun in a dwarf galaxy next to the Milky Way, according to a new study to be published in The Astrophysical Journal. Researchers inferred the black hole’s presence from the trajectories of 21 hypervelocity stars zipping through the Milky Way’s outskirts, finding that

There is a supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. There is also a lot of other stuff there as well. Young stars, gas, dust, and stellar-mass black holes. It’s a happening place.It is also surrounded by a veil of interstellar gas and dust, which means we can’t observe the region in visible light. We can