Space

This year, the number of NASA-tracked confirmed worlds discovered beyond our solar system surpassed 6,000, and several thousand more await confirmation. The milestone, reached just three decades after the Nobel Prize-winning discovery of the first planet orbiting a sunlike star in 1995, is largely the result of the planet-hunting power of NASA’s Kepler space telescope and Transiting…

They may not be home for Christmas, but astronauts in space are finding their own way to make the season bright. They’ve even hung their space stockings by the airlock with care. Four astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS) are sending their best Christmas wishes to Earth as they orbit our planet. NASA astronauts Mike Fincke, Zena Cardman and Chris Williams and Kimiya Yui of the…

Far from shipping lanes, cities, and even most scientific outposts lie the South Sandwich Islands, one of the most remote island chains on Earth. Stretching in a slender arc through the stormy South Atlantic Ocean, these islands sit more than 994 miles (1,600 kilometers) from both South America and Antarctica. In this satellite image, puffs of low-level cloud drift across Vindication and Candlemas…

2025 has seen stargazers look on in awe as a trio of magnificent comets barreled headlong into the inner solar system to survive a close brush with the sun, only to emerge to race back out into the blackness of space, never to be seen again. Of these comets — the interstellar invader 3I/ATLAS, C/2025 A6 (Lemmon) and C/2025 R2 (SWAN) — not all survived their trial by solar radiation intact…