NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite has found two “super-puff” planets in the same system, each one as light as cotton candy.
The post Cotton-Candy Exoplanets: Two for the Price of One! appeared first on Sky & Telescope.
This is the largest high-resolution photo ever made of our Milky Way galaxy’s centre in visible light. It was taken on 23 March 2025 by the European Space Agency’s Euclid space telescope. Packed with more than 60 million stars, this image opens the door for scientists to confirm the existence of any exoplanet found in…
Astronaut Mark Watney is stranded on Mars and must somehow find a way to grow potatoes in the planet’s unforgiving, ochre soil before he starves. This is the plot of The Martian, which is very much a work of fiction. But for a real-life space botanist, look no further than Jessica Atkin. Her skills might…
We know dark matter is out there. It’s just a placeholder term for something we don’t understand, some ghostly mass that explains how galaxies rotate so quickly without flying apart. Fritz Zwicky coined the term ‘Dark Matter’ based largely on his observations of galaxies in the Coma Cluster. Zwicky found that the galaxies were moving…
A new report from NASA’s Office of Inspector General spells out dire launch infrastructure needs at Kennedy Space Center and Wallops Flight Facility. One solution is for Congress to pass legislation giving NASA authority to receive money from commercial partners for capital infrastructure investments. DOD was given such authority more than a decade ago. Today’s…
The weather cover for the Artemis 3 SLS core stage arrived at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. (Image credit: NASA/Amber Jean Notvest) Did a flying saucer just land at NASA? It sure looks like it. This is actually the weather cover for the core stage of NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, which is currently gearing…
The past 250 years of optical telescopes have seen revolutionary discoveries and technology that the telescope’s inventor, a seventeenth century spectacle-maker by the name of Hans Lippershey, maybe wouldn’t have believed possible. When we look back through the annals of telescope history, we find that a significant turning point came, coincidentally, just five years after…