Space

There are few better ways to spend the long winter nights than under a crisp, clear December sky — and between Christmas and New Year’s Eve 2025, the Northern Hemisphere night sky will be at its very best. A waxing moon will glide past Saturn, the Pleiades and Jupiter — now shining brightly in the east, right on cue, as a “Christmas Star — while deep-sky wonders like the Rosette Nebula…

NASA’s SPHEREx observatory has completed its first map of the entire sky over Earth, and it is incredible. Beyond its aesthetic value, the map and the rest of the data collected by SPHEREx, which launched in March this year, will help astronomers answer some of the biggest cosmic questions. Among these are: what happened during the first billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second…

Since it began operations in 2022, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has allowed scientists to make incredible strides in our understanding of the cosmos  — especially its early epoch. However, one lingering cosmological mystery that the JWST hasn’t had a major impact on is the nature of dark matter. Now, new research suggests that this is something that may soon change. While dark…

Darryl Z. Seligman is an Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Michigan State University. Comet 3I/ATLAS is the third large interstellar visitor that we have ever discovered —- an asteroid or comet that originated outside of our solar system and was discovered passing through. Astronomers can glean information about celestial bodies by observing the light reflected off them with…