Stanford researchers have offered an explanation for why some sizzling, lava-covered worlds nestled tightly around their stars can retain their atmospheres. At such close quarters, intense stellar radiation should strip away a planet’s air.

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Planets form from disks of gas and dust around young stars, but the gas needed for growth does not last forever. New observations from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) now offer a new view of how this gas escapes and how the process changes as young planetary systems develop.

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Dark matter is known to make up roughly 85% of all mass in the universe, as evidenced by the way galaxies spin and how galaxy clusters are held together under gravity. Yet despite decades of searching, physicists have never managed to detect the elusive substance directly.

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When a star reaches its final stages of life, it ends in a bright, powerful explosion called a supernova and scatters material across the universe. A new study led by a University of Hawai’i at Mānoa researcher has discovered that the moon’s mixed-up soil can be read as a cosmic time capsule for exploding stars. […]

The moon’s getting its first airport, and it’s about to get busy. Within the next two decades, NASA’s planned Gateway—humanity’s first lunar spaceport—may become a bustling hub for Orion crew capsules, lunar landers, cargo vehicles and astronauts traveling between Earth, the moon and, eventually, destinations in the deep unknown.

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The universe is known to be expanding at an accelerating rate. Physicists typically attribute this acceleration to dark energy, a mysterious component of the universe that exerts negative pressure, causing space to expand faster. Dark energy is thought to have become the predominant influence on the universe’s evolution around 3–4 billion years ago, at the […]

A NASA-led team hopes to take a shortcut to direct imaging of extrasolar Earth-like planets. The idea is to use what they call a hybrid telescope composed of an orbital starshade coupled with the next-generation extremely large ground-based optical telescopes.

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Washington State University researchers used artificial intelligence to find a more efficient, less expensive way to 3D-print a high-performance metal alloy, saving researchers from needing to painstakingly test more than 100 million options.

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