At least two ingredients are needed to make jets — rotation and magnetic fields — and these produce the ubiquitous laserlike jets we see.

On December 9th, Neptune will attain its stationary point at 7 P.M. EST, marking the conclusion of its retrograde motion. The ice giant will be situated near Saturn and the Circlet of Pisces in the ...

The universe began with an unimaginably hot, dense state. Inflation rapidly expanded the universe's size. Before inflation, the universe existed in a period called the GUT era where forces were ...

Use the Big Dipper to locate Polaris, the North Star. Orion's belt helps find other bright stars like Sirius. Follow the Big Dipper's handle to find Arcturus and Spica. The Summer Triangle is formed ...

The Space Shuttle program was extremely expensive. Shuttle turnaround times were much slower than planned. The Space Shuttle had significant safety issues, resulting in two fatal accidents. These ...

Voyager 1 and 2, launched in 1977, have traversed the heliopause and are currently in interstellar space, with Voyager 1 significantly farther from the Sun due to its higher velocity. The Oort Cloud, ...

David Eicher is one of the most widely recognized astronomy enthusiasts in the world. He has been with Astronomy magazine for 36 years, beginning as an assistant editor and working through associate, ...

The aurora borealis, or Northern Lights, is caused by solar wind particles colliding with Earth's atmosphere. Ancient Chinese texts describe a five-colored aurora event dating back to around 977 or ...

The speed of light is a fundamental constant, approximately 299,792,458 meters per second. It's the same for all observers and hasn't changed measurably over billions of years. Nothing can travel ...

The Biosphere 2 facility, specifically its Landscape Evolution Observatory (LEO), serves as a research platform to investigate how life transforms landscapes, ranging from local environments to ...

Apollo mission lunar samples provided crucial data, initially intended to test existing Moon formation theories (capture, co-formation, fission), but ultimately leading to the development of the Giant ...

The Apollo program utilized a sextant, a centuries-old navigational instrument, as a backup guidance and navigation system in the Command Module, independent of the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) and ...