Anyone who has ever performed an internet search will most likely have encountered the phenomenon of the Google Doodle, a graphic or sometimes an animation at the top of the Google search page. These thought-provoking and often amusing illustrations celebrate anniversaries, events and individuals, among them a fair selection of astronomers, space missions, and astronomical…

Neil Armstrong was the first man on the Moon — but only a few pictures from the crew’s cameras show him on his historic moonwalk. In one of them (above), he is visible as a reflection in Buzz Aldrin’s helmet. Credit: NASA Professional and amateur astronomers alike love to share facts about our amazing universe:…

For the first time ever, astronomers have witnessed the black hole at the center of a galaxy roaring to life in real time — and they’re not sure why it happened.  The awakening of the cosmic monster, which is a million times the mass of our sun and located 300 million light-years away inside the…

Astronomers have spotted two active black holes merging at their farthest distance ever — just 900 million years after the Big Bang. This is the first time that two luminous supermassive black holes have been spotted during cosmic dawn. Cosmic dawn is the time encompassing the first billion years of the universe. During this period,…

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has obtained its first images since changing to an alternate operating mode that uses only one gyroscope, which helps control and orient the telescope. This Hubble image shows NGC 1546, a spiral galaxy approximately 52.5 million light-years away in the constellation of Dorado. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubblr…

Astronaut David A. Wolf works outside the International Space Station (ISS) in 2002. Credit: NASA. In the coming decade, more people will go to space than ever before as human spaceflight enters a new era. NASA, the European Space Agency and other governmental agencies are partnering to develop crewed missions beyond the Moon. At the same time,…

A distant star first spotted decades ago is actually a pair of baby stars that are each spewing powerful energy jets parallel to one another, scientists have discovered.  The unlikely twins were finally identified thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which peered through a dense cloud of cosmic dust to spy the adjacent…

In July 1054, astronomers in China documented a “guest star” in the sky that shone as brightly as Jupiter for nearly a month before gradually fading into invisibility.  That “star” was, in fact, a cloud of debris blown into space by a dying star roughly 6,500 light-years away in the constellation Taurus. In the 19th…

Scientists for years thought the galaxy SDSS1335+0728 was about as remarkable as its serial code name.  Then it did something scientists had never seen a galaxy do: Suddenly, this frankly forgettable space neighborhood 300 million light-years away threw the lights on. That happened nearly five years ago, and it’s only gotten brighter since. Astronomers believe…