EarthSky

Voyager 2 met Uranus, our sun’s 7th planet, on January 24, 1986. Afterwards, as Voyager sped ever-outward from our sun, it obtained this backlit image. Image via NASA/JPL. EarthSky’s 2026

View larger. | Artist’s concept of a large disk of debris, surrounded by a thick cloud of dust and gas, passing in front of a star. Astronomers said there’s a

This is Sagittarius A* (pronounced Sagittarius A-star), the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. Sagittarius A* is oddly placid these days, but new research says

This is the new sungrazing comet C/2026 A1 (MAPS). Image via Gerald Rhemann and Michael Jäger. Used with permission. New sungrazing comet inbound There’s a new comet headed into the

View larger. | This is an artist’s concept of a super-Earth with a deep magma ocean generating a magnetic field. Could powerful magnetic fields on super-Earths help these worlds be

View larger. | This is an artist’s concept of Kepler-186f, an Earth-sized exoplanet about 500 light-years from Earth. It was the 1st Earth-sized exoplanet found in the habitable zone of

Artist’s illustration of K2-18 b, an exoplanet that could be habitable. But what does habitable mean? It doesn’t mean we’re planning to colonize it, or that alien life exists there.

View at EarthSky Community Photos. | Garth Battista captured this scene of fireflies in the Catskill Mountains on June 23, 2025. Garth wrote: “Mountaintop fireflies! One firefly’s path seems to

A screenshot of the SETI@home user interface on a desktop computer in 2009. The software ran on millions of home computers worldwide, analyzing radio data from space in search of

View larger. | Jupiter’s ocean moon Europa is one of the most promising places to search for alien life in our solar system. Now, a new study suggests that Europa’s