Why NASA Is Flying a Nuclear Drone to Titan

Why NASA Is Flying a Nuclear Drone to Titan

The Dragonfly octocopter landed on dark frozen dunes on Titan, ringed Saturn hanging in the amber sky above scattered water-ice pebbles

The CMB Cold Spot: A Cold Case 20 Years On

Hundreds of bright spiral and elliptical galaxies ringing a huge empty dark circle of space, a cosmic void with almost no galaxies inside

The Wow! Signal at 50: Still Unexplained

A brilliant blue flare lighting the ragged edge of a vast dark interstellar hydrogen cloud against a starfield

How to Terraform Venus: The Harder, Hotter Twin

A futuristic floating aerostat city of white balloon habitats with warm glowing windows hovering above an endless sea of golden Venusian clouds at sunset

Why Isn't Artemis III Going to the Moon?

Two different lunar lander spacecraft, one tall silver rocket-like vehicle and one squat gold-foil lander, flying in formation above Earth at night with city lights and a green aurora below

Are We Living Inside a 2-Billion-Light-Year Void?

A translucent bubble-like underdense region of space at the center of the cosmic web, with bright galaxy clusters and golden filaments streaming outward from its edges toward denser glowing walls

A Sol on Mars: One Day in a Human Martian Colony

An astronaut in a slim white suit standing on a rocky Martian ridge watching a brilliant blue glow spread around the setting sun, Earth a faint pale-blue star above, a small domed colony glowing in the valley below

The Flying Roadster: Real Rocket Science

A small glowing vehicle ascending over a rocket test facility at night beneath the Milky Way, with expanding ring-shaped thruster plumes and long-exposure light trails

What If the Sun Became a Black Hole?

Earth frozen completely solid, its whole surface locked in blue-white ice, hanging in a pitch-black starfield with no sun

How to Turn Mars Into Earth: The Step-by-Step Blueprint

A superconducting magnetic shield station at the Mars–Sun L1 point deflecting the solar wind

Dyson Spheres: Alien Megastructure Search

A star encircled by a Dyson swarm, glowing with industrial waste heat in the infrared

The Biggest Black Holes in the Universe, Ranked

The quasar TON 618 blazing at the heart of a distant galaxy

The Fermi Paradox: Where Is Everybody?

A radio telescope array listening to the night sky for signals from deep space

Project Starshot: Sailing to Alpha Centauri

A lightsail probe approaching Proxima Centauri, its destination star glowing ahead

What’s Inside a Black Hole? The Singularity Problem

A fuzzball: a black hole imagined as a tangled ball of quantum strings with no singularity

EHT Films a Hot Spot Orbiting Sagittarius A*

Radio dishes of the Event Horizon Telescope array under the Milky Way, the galactic center glowing above

Fast Radio Burst Repeats Every 16 Days

A giant radio telescope dish receiving a brilliant pulse of radio waves arriving from deep space

A Sharper Spectrum of K2-18 b

Close-up of an ocean world exoplanet limb with a glowing teal atmosphere at the terminator

JWST Reveals Star Nurseries in Carina

Newborn stars emerging from dark dusty pillars inside a stellar nursery, glowing blue and gold

JWST Spots "Naked" Black Hole Seeds

Faint red primordial galaxies at cosmic dawn with a brilliant point of light marking a nascent black hole seed

Are Europa’s Water Plumes Real?

A spacecraft flying over the cracked ice of Europa as a water vapor plume erupts behind it, Jupiter looming

Ship-to-Ship Refueling: the Key to the Moon and Mars

Two stainless steel Starships docked nose-to-nose in Earth orbit transferring propellant above a sunrise Earth