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The fate of our Sun, along with 97 percent of the universe’s stars, is to become a white dwarf. These stellar relics are what is left when an aging star sheds most of its mass, ending up as a dense, shrunken, Earth-size core composed of carbon and…

The ice-covered moon Europa has long intrigued researchers as a potential abode for extraterrestrial life. Although its orbit around Jupiter is frigidly far from the Sun, Europa harbors an internal ocean. Furthermore, this inner liquid reservoir…

Mars, also known as the Red Planet, will soon welcome another robotic visitor sent from our Blue Planet. On May 5, 2018, NASA launched the InSight mission, an elaborate acronym for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat…

The third mission ever to visit the solar system's innermost planet, Mercury, began on October 20, 2018, with the launch of BepiColombo. The mission will attempt to answer longstanding mysteries about Mercury, including its internal structure and…

The Kepler space telescope—the most prolific discoverer of exoplanets, or worlds outside our solar system, to date—has run out of fuel and ceased science operations, NASA announced on October 30, 2018. Kepler leaves a legacy for first revealing that…

The science of exoplanets—worlds beyond our solar system—has thus far focused more on quantity than quality. The considerable distances to most of the several thousand exoplanets catalogued to date, coupled with the limitations of current telescope…

Observing a neutron star in infrared light—a low-energy form of radiation seldom used for studying these cosmic objects—has revealed features that seem to have eluded astronomers' notice going back decades. The features could be a dusty disk…

On August 12, 2018, NASA's first mission to "touch" the Sun got underway with the launch of the Parker Solar Probe from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Over a seven-year period, the Parker Solar Probe will complete 24 orbits of the Sun.…

In an astrophysics breakthrough, researchers have captured a blazar—a kind of galaxy—in the act of slinging out high-energy neutrinos. The discovery serves as the first-ever confirmation of a natural "particle accelerator" generating the energetic…

The newest planet-hunting space telescope, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), launched on April 18, 2018 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. TESS will now begin a two-year observing campaign of the entire sky. The…