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Outer Space

New Research

NASA Scientists Are Trying to Make Medicine Onboard the ISS

Scientists are sending fungi to the space station to see what pharmaceuticals astronauts can brew

Pluto’s ‘heart’ is a giant crater that may be slowly moving across the dwarf planet’s surface, scientists say.

Pluto May Have a Wandering Heart

The enormous impact basin may be slowly traveling across the dwarf planet’s surface

Features like the Marius Hills pit could be skylights in lava tubes that could one day house underground moon bases.

New Research

Future Moon Bases Might Be Built in Underground Lava Tubes

Caverns carved out by ancient lava could shelter astronauts from the hazards of moon life

Volcanic activity in the moon billions of years ago may have caused its poles to shift.

New Research

Ancient Volcanoes May Have Shifted the Moon’s Poles

Ice deposits point to the moon’s old poles

liquid gravity, 2013. A cosmonaut seems to levitate in an industrial environment but the view of Earth through a porthole “dislocates the viewer’s perspective,” Najjar writes in an email. The image comes from Najjar’s experience in the hydrolab, a huge tank of water, at the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center.

Art Meets Science

An Artist Imagines the Future of Humans in Space

Through manipulated photographs and video, Michael Najjar tackles the meaning of space travel

The bright spots of Occator Crater are shown in enhanced color in this view from NASA's Dawn spacecraft.

New Research

New NASA Images Shed Light on Ceres’ Bright Spots

Yet the dwarf planet serves up fresh mysteries

Astrophysicist Kip Thorne dared to dream of a machine to find gravitational waves.

Think Big

The Detection of Gravitational Waves Was a Scientific Breakthrough, but What’s Next?

Scientists are sitting on top of the world after this monumental discovery and are eager to keep exploring the universe

New Research

NASA Spies a Supernova’s First Shockwave

Astronomers spot the first flash of a distant supernova in visible light

The green object is the comet 252P/LINEAR as it passed by the Larger Megellanic Cloud.

Trending Today

A Pair of Comets Are Making a Record-Breaking Pass by Earth

This is the closest a comet has come in 246 years

New Research

Five New Things We Learned About Pluto This Week

A new set of studies paints Pluto as a weirder planet than scientists once thought

Aluminized suits are used to reflect heat at the Armed Forces Firefighting School. Chanute Field, Illinois, in 1977.

Trending Today

NASA’s Starting a Fire in Space

How will flames react in microgravity?

An artist's rendering of the ESA's Trace Gas Orbiter

Trending Today

Mission to Find Life on Mars Blasts Off

The European Space Agency kicks off its ExoMars project to look for methane and other signs of life in the Martian atmosphere

An illustration of galaxy superclusters and cosmic voids, similar to the structure of the BOSS Great Wall

Cool Finds

Meet the BOSS, the Largest Structure in the Universe (So Far)

Astronomers recently discovered a wall of galaxies 1 billion light years across, larger than anything else yet identified in the cosmos

An artist's rendering of the sweltering surface of Venus.

New Research

A Giant Planetary Smashup May Have Turned Venus Hot and Hellish

A collision with a large object may have triggered changes deep inside the planet that ultimately affected its atmosphere

NASA's InSight lander inside a clean room at Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver.

Trending Today

NASA Delays the InSight Probe’s Voyage to Mars

Originally scheduled for this month, NASA now plans to launch the probe in 2018

Meet GN-z11, the "newest" old galaxy discovered by Hubble.

Cool Finds

Hubble Spotted the Oldest Galaxy It Has Ever Seen

Look back in time with a glimpse at a galaxy that’s 13.4 billion light years away

Explore the Magnificent and Mysterious Surface of the Moon in Pictures

At the National Air and Space Museum, beautiful images show how the moon’s pockmarked surface is rife with mystery

New Research

Pluto’s North Pole Is Streaked With Canyons

Enormous pits and frozen valleys straddle Pluto’s northern hemisphere

CSIRO's Compact Array telescope picked the Fast Radio Burst's afterglow.

New Research

Astronomers Finally Tracked a Strange Radio Wave Burst to Its Source

With new insights into radio waves, scientists may be able to measure the mass of the universe

My God, it's full of gas.

New Research

Marvel at the Newest Map of the Milky Way

It is the most complete map of the cold galaxy ever made

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