Articles tagged as Astronomy | Smithsonian Magazine

New Research

Saturn Is Making (And Destroying) Mini-Moons All The Time

Saturn’s F ring is a little moon factory

September 10, 2014

New Research

Turns Out We Live in the Laniakea Galactic Supercluster

Add another line to your celestial address: Astronomers just found out we live in the Laniakea Galactic Supercluster

September 4, 2014

Cool Finds

The Surprisingly Complicated Reason Why Stars Look Like They Have Points

Stars are star-shaped because of imperfection in our eyes

September 2, 2014

A Perseid streaks across the sky over the archaeological site Stobi in modern-day Macedonia

Watch the remains of comet Swift-Tuttle burn up in the atmosphere

August 12, 2014

Google hosts its fourth-annual science fair. Shown here, the 2013 winners.

Google Thinks These 18 Teenagers Will Change the World

The global finalists of this year’s Google Science Fair take on cyberbullying countermeasures, tar sands cleanup and wearable tech

August 8, 2014

A close up of the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko taken from just 80 miles up.

It’s been a long trip, but Rosetta has finally reached its destination

August 6, 2014

Cool Finds

Here’s How Astronomers Actually Find Planets in Other Solar Systems

Astronomers have found 1,741 exoplanets. But how, exactly?

August 4, 2014

"Watermarks" earned first place in the contest. “The way water in this picture found its way back to the ocean reminded me of a peacock's tail spreading under the sun or a woman's hair blowing in the wind,” Sadri writes.

Art Meets Science

Who Knew Fungi and Fruit Fly Ovaries Could Be So Beautiful?

Princeton University’s annual science art contest shines a light on the research world, adding a video element this year

July 22, 2014

An amateur photograph of galaxy NGC 5907 by Flickr user korborh. On its own it doesn't look like much, but combined with hundreds more it can reveal new secrets about the universe.

New Research

Astronomers Are Doing Real Science With Space Photos They Found on Flickr

Want to help research? Grab a camera and point it to the heavens

July 15, 2014

New Research

We Know Physics is Largely White and Male, But Exactly How White and Male is Still Striking

Most current physics students will likely never have an African American physics teacher, says a new survey

July 14, 2014

Surely this exoplanet deserves a better name than CoRoT-7b.

Cool Finds

Ok, Now There’s an Actual, Official Contest to Name New Exoplanets

The International Astronomical Union is throwing their own exoplanet naming contest

July 10, 2014

An artist's rendition of Gliese 581g from 2010. Unfortunately the artist put a planet where there isn't one.

New Research

Gliese 581g, the First Exoplanet Found That May Have Been Able to Host Life, Doesn’t Actually Exist

So long Gliese 581g, the potentially habitable exoplanet that never was

July 7, 2014

This image was taken while exploring a 1300m lava cave in Iceland. In some areas the roof has caved in, so snow piles up in the winter time and creates these snow peaks. The aurora at its peak gleams through the roof of the cave and despite only taking up a small portion of the photo, it remains the focal point.

Cool Finds

These Amazing Pictures Made the Shortlist For Astronomy Photographer of the Year

The competition, now in it’s sixth year highlights beautiful images of the sky from around the world

July 3, 2014

The newly discovered "mega-Earth" Kepler-10c dominates the foreground in this artist's conception. Its sibling, the lava world Kepler-10b, is in the background. Both orbit a sunlike star. Kepler-10c has a diameter of about 18,000 miles, 2.3 times as large as Earth, and weighs 17 times as much. Therefore it is all solids, although it may possess a thin atmosphere shown here as wispy clouds.

New Research

This Rocky Exoplanet is Really, Really Big—Too Big

Kepler-10c is a rocky planet that’s too big to be a rocky planet

June 4, 2014

This year, Smithsonian magazine's festival is themed "Science Meets Science Fiction."

Future Is Here Festival

The Future is (Still) Here: Day Two of Smithsonian’s Second Annual Conference

Instead of holding its own global fest this year, Nerd Nite descended on our nation’s capital.

May 2014

A combination of infrared and X-ray observations indicates that a surplus of massive stars has formed from a large disk of gas around Sagittarius A*.

Future Is Here Festival

Inside Black Holes

Three recent black hole events and how they shape our universe

May 17, 2014

Left, a golden record (© Nasa/National Geographic Society/Corbis) Right, the other side of the golden record shows directions to play it. Identical records carrying the story of Earth were sent into deep space on Voyager 1 and 2.

Future Is Here Festival

The Golden Record 2.0 Will Crowdsource A Selfie of Human Culture

Inspired by a similar effort in the 1970s, the project wants your help in creating a portrait of humanity to send out of the solar system

May 17, 2014

Atlas V Launches the New Horizons Mission to Pluto.

Future Is Here Festival

Take a Peek Into the Future’s Present With Our Live Coverage of Smithsonian’s Two-Day Festival

The magazine’s 2nd annual conference brings together experts, authors and visionaries in the fields of science, science fiction and technology.

May 2014

Life in the Cosmos

Sara Seager’s Tenacious Drive to Discover Another Earth

Planetary scientist Sara Seager has turned tragedy into tenacity in her search for new Earths among the stars

May 2014

Sequential shots showing a 2010 lunar eclipse.

Tonight’s eclipse is the first of a rare spurt of lunar eclipses for the western hemisphere

April 14, 2014