One of the great aims of this magazine is to underscore that we are awash in a golden age of astronomy. The previous generation produced a firehose of discoveries and new understan ...

OUR FEBRUARY 2022 ISSUE featured an article by Michael E. Bakich called “Meet 20 Great Astronomers.” In it, Bakich wrote, “I love ranked lists because they get me thinking. I ...

Mysterious threads glow brightly in this view of the Milky Way Galaxy, shown in radio waves. The composite is a mosaic of 20 images taken over 200 hours by the South African Radio ...

FIRST LIGHT A month after its December launch, NASA’s Imaging X-ray Polarimeter Explorer (IXPE) returned its first scientific image: the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A. LAST SUPP ...

All large galaxies host supermassive black holes weighing millions or billions of times the Sun’s mass. Some are actively sucking in material, releasing energy in the process. Th ...

JUST OVER 4 LIGHT-YEARS AWAY IS PROXIMA CENTAURI, the closest star to the Sun. In August 2016, researchers found a planet circling this star. Then, in January 2020, they spotted a ...

Although galaxies seem to drift through the vast cosmic sea alone, astronomers now know that interactions between galaxies are quite common. Some 300 million light-years away, this ...

ABOUT 4,000 LIGHT-YEARS from Earth, an astral entity is releasing a large, minute-long flash of radiation three times an hour. About every 20 minutes, the object becomes one of the ...