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If you live in the Northern Hemisphere and look up during July evenings, you’ll see the brilliant star Vega shining overhead. Did you know that Vega is one of the most studied stars in our skies? As one of the brightest summer…
High above us, particles from the Sun hurtle toward Earth, colliding with the upper atmosphere and creating powerful explosions in a murky process called magnetic reconnection. A single magnetic reconnection event can release as much energy as the entire United…
NASA research has shown that cell-like compartments called vesicles could form naturally in the lakes of Saturn’s moon Titan. Titan is the only world apart from Earth that is known to have liquid on its surface. However, Titan’s lakes and…
Sixty years ago, NASA’s Mariner 4 captured groundbreaking views of the Red Planet, leading to a steady stream of advances in the cameras used to study other worlds. In 1965, NASA’s Mariner 4 mission brought Mars into American living rooms,…
On its record-breaking pass by the Sun late last year, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe captured stunning new images from within the Sun’s atmosphere. These newly released images — taken closer to the Sun than we’ve ever been before — are…
A.M./P.M. Planet Watching, Plus the Eagle Constellation Mars shines in the evening, and is joined briefly by Mercury. Jupiter joins Venus as the month goes on. And all month, look for Aquila the eagle. Skywatching Highlights All Month – Planet…
An unexpectedly strong solar storm rocked our planet on April 23, 2023, sparking auroras as far south as southern Texas in the U.S. and taking the world by surprise. Two days earlier, the Sun blasted a coronal mass ejection (CME)…
by Kat Troche of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific As summer deepens in the Northern Hemisphere, a familiar constellation rises with the galactic core of the Milky Way each evening: Scorpius the Scorpion. One of the twelve zodiacal constellations,…
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is testing a series of large spacecraft rolls that will help it hunt for water. After nearly 20 years of operations, NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) is on a roll, performing a new maneuver to squeeze…
In addition to drilling rock core samples, the science team has been grinding its way into rocks to make sense of the scientific evidence hiding just below the surface. On June 3, NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover ground down a portion…