365 Days of Astronomy - Weekly Edition

We lost a bright star here on planet Earth last week. NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson passed away at the age of 101, after an incredible career of helping humans land on the Moon. If you saw the…

A brand new telescope has completed on Maui's Haleakala, and it has just one job: to watch the Sun in unprecedented detail. It's called the Daniel K. Inouye telescope, and the engineering involved to…

We've been following this story for more than a decade, so it's great to finally have an answer to the question, why was supernova 2006gy so insanely bright? Astronomers originally thought it was an …

On the one hand, red dwarfs are the longest lived stars in the Universe, the perfect place for life to hang out for trillions of years. On the other hand, they're tempestuous little balls of plasma, …

For the longest time astronomers could only study the skies with telescopes. But then new techniques and technologies were developed to help us see in different wavelengths. Now astronomers can study…

The other big issue at the AAS was the challenge that astronomy is going to face from all the new satellite constellations coming shortly. There are already 180 Starlinks in orbit, and thousands more…

This week we're live at the American Astronomical Society's 235th meeting in Honolulu, Hawai'i. We learned about new planets, black holes and star formation, but the big issue hanging over the whole …

Huge surveys of the sky are finding more and more planets, stars and galaxies. But they're also turning up strange objects astronomers have never seen before, like Boyajian's star. Today we're going…

The Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation is the earliest moment in the Universe that we can see with our telescopes, just a few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang itself. What will it take fo…

Powerful observatories like Hubble and the Very Large Telescope have pushed our vision billions of light-years into the Universe, allowing us to see further and further back in time. But there are re…

Last week we gave you an update on the formation of elements from the Big Bang and in main sequence stars like the Sun. This week, we wrap up with a bang, talking about the death of the most massive …

Few sciences have been able to take advantage of the power of computers like astronomy. But with all this computing power, you might be surprised to learn how important a role humans still play in th…

Before we discovered other planets, our Solar System seemed like a perfectly reasonable template for everywhere. But now we see massive planets close to their stars, which leads you to the question, …

Things used to be so simple. Comets were snowballs from the outer Solar System, and asteroids were rocks from the inner Solar System. But now everything's all shades of grey. Astronomers have found a…

Our series on Universe weirdness marches on. This week we take a look at the habitable zone, and how things aren't as simple as we thought.

Our series on Universe weirdness continues, this time we learn how astronomers are struggling to make sense of the age of the Universe.