Astrophysics

There’s more than one way for a star to die. Some go with a whimper, and some go with a very, very big bang

Space weather is heating up in our current solar cycle peak

NASA’s NEOWISE telescope has searched for asteroids, brown dwarfs and luminous galaxies. The spacecraft will soon burn up in Earth’s atmosphere

Claims of alien starships visiting Earth always fall short, but people still fall for them

With the confirmation of gravitational waves less than a decade old, scientists are barreling ahead with new detectors to pick up ever more elusive ripples in spacetime

The James Webb Space Telescope’s search for the earliest stars and black holes has yielded a very weird, very red, puzzle

Analyzing 1,504 supernovae into the distant universe, astronomers have shown the clearest evidence yet for cosmological time dilation as predicted by Einstein

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope observed an unusually large and highly luminous galaxy at a record-breaking 290 million years after the big bang

The iconic star Polaris appears to be much younger than its true age. The secret: it’s eating another star

NASA’s head of heliophysics explains how we weathered the worst solar storm of a generation—and discusses the challenges we face in preparing for the next one

Cosmic Microwave Background Stage 4, a top-priority project for U.S. astrophysics, was designed to make breakthrough observations of the universe’s very earliest moments. Now the U.S. government says it can’t currently support the project’s construction at the South Pole

A supernova showering Earth with radioactive debris is a surprisingly common cosmic occurrence