The countdown has begun. The crew is ready. And barring any last-minute hiccups, four astronauts on Wednesday will begin a journey that sends them farther from Earth than any human has gone before.

Exciting planetary action takes place this month. Venus and Uranus vie for attention and lie close to each other in late April. Jupiter offers a lot to observe through a telescope, particularly events ...

After 25 years of planning, six years of data collection, and six more years of analysis, scientists have published a portion of the final results of the Dark Energy Survey (DES) — the largest, most ...

Karen Meech doesn’t spend a lot of time digging through Earth’s rocks. An astronomer by trade, she is usually behind the telescope, investigating comets and looking for hints about how Earth got its ...

A series of powerful observations has made it clear that our universe has expanded for billions of years, emerging from the hot, dense state we call the Big Bang. Over the past several decades, new ...

The world’s best-selling astronomy magazine offers you the most exciting, visually stunning, and timely coverage of the heavens above. Each issue includes expert science reporting, vivid color ...

Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO; ESA/XMM-Newton; Optical HST: NASA/ESA/STScI; Optical Ground: Deep Space Remote observatories/B. Fera and S. Mandel; ESO/VLT As odd couples go, it’s tough to beat the ...

In less time than it takes to snap your fingers, the universe flashed into existence. Cosmogenesis is the breathtaking story of how this happened. It includes, in its later moments, the creation of ...

The theory of general relativity, under which space itself can curve, allows for the universe to take one of three forms: flat like a sheet of paper, closed like a sphere, or open like a saddle. This ...

In the late 1970s, Vera Rubin and Kent Ford of the Carnegie Institution of Washington stared, confused, at the punch-card readouts from their observations of the Andromeda Galaxy. The vast spiral ...

We’ve never heard a peep from aliens. But improved technology is speeding up the search for extra- terrestrial intelligence (SETI), so what happens if today’s silence suddenly gives way to tomorrow’s ...

As humans have evolved on Earth, many naturally occurring events — earthquakes, volcanoes, destructive weather — have struck fear into their hearts. At the top of the list, I contend, is the ...